The Silent Prophet

1

The train took over eighteen hours to cover the short stretch between Kursk and Voronezh. It was a cold and clear winter’s day. For a few niggardly hours the sun shone so strongly from a dark-blue, almost southern, sky that the men jumped out of the cold dark carriages at each of the frequent stopping-places, doffed their coats as if for some heavy work in the heat of summer, washed themselves with crunchy snow and dried off in the air and sun. In the course of this short day they had all acquired brown faces like folk in winter on the sportive heights of Switzerland. But twilight came suddenly and a sharp crystalline monotonous singing wind sharpened the dark cold of the long night and seemed incessantly to polish the frost, so that it became even more cutting and piercing. The windows of the coaches lacked panes. They had been replaced by boards, newspapers and rags. Here and there flickered a forlorn candle-stump, stuck on some chance metal projection on a wall or door, the purpose of which no one could any longer explain and which, paltry as it appeared, thanks to its very purposelessness recalled the long-lost luxury of trains and travel. There were first and third class coaches as it happened, coupled together, but all the passengers froze. Now and again someone stood up, took off his boots, blew inside them, rubbed his feet with his hands, and drew his boots on again carefully as if he wanted not to have to take them off again in the course of that night. Others considered it better to stand on tiptoe every few minutes and to make hopping movements. Each envied the other. Each thought his neighbour was better off, and the only remarks to be heard in the entire train were to do with the presumed goodness and warmth of this overcoat or that fur cap. Under the sleeves of a soldier a comrade had discerned grey and red striped mittens, whose origin even the owner himself could not account for. He swore that they were absolutely useless. One man, in his forties, with a wildly-grown red beard, reminiscent of a hangman, a satyr and a blacksmith all in one, but who two years before had run a peaceful grocery business, insisted on seeing the mittens. Since the Revolution, in which he had lost everything, he had wandered from one army to another until finally remaining with the Reds. He played the part of a much experienced man, a prophet who could foresee everything. He divined many things. With all his goodness of heart, he could live scarcely an hour without starting a quarrel. It seemed as if he found his own changeable existence tedious. The owner of the mittens was a shy peasant lad from the Tambov district, who would not hand them over out of embarrassment. Finally he had to submit to their removal by a neighbour who was a sailor, a jack-of-all-trades, a conjurer, a cook and a tailor, with the face of a provincial actor. The sailor knew about that kind of thing and declared that the English had invented mittens and human life resided entirely in the pulses. Consequently, as long as one protected them, one had no need to wear a fur. One after the other, they pulled on the scraps of wool and asserted that they really warmed like an oven. The sailor claimed to know that the girl who had presented these mittens to the lad from the Tambov district was an even better warming agent, and everyone asked if it were true.

The men who were just now discussing warmth came from the Siberian front, where they had beaten back the Czech legionaries, and where they had hoped to stay longer and relax for a few weeks after a victory which was a decisive one in their eyes but which, in reality, signified only a provisional success. Instead of this, they had to go to the Ukraine, where the cold seemed crueller to them than in Siberia, even though their commandant, Comrade B., showed them with a thermometer in his hand that it did not reach more than 25 degrees below zero. The red-bearded one said there was nothing so unreliable as mercury. He himself had once had a fever and had a thermometer stuck in his mouth by a doctor. When he took it out it showed no more than 36 degrees, about as much as, say, a fish. However, the doctor had said that his pulse was too rapid for such a low temperature, and that might prove to be the case with the frost. Why did one have two or even three kinds of degrees of heat and cold? Because even the men of science were not at one over Celsius or Réaumur.

In fact, the troops froze more because they advanced slowly, had to retreat again, and because in the south they had to contend with better organized and more numerous enemy forces. Also they were still exhausted by the long journey, after which they were immediately thrown into the struggle again. The small war of movement had become as accepted by them as the great World War had once been, and just as they had lain patiently for months before the fortress of Przemysl or in the Carpathians, so they had now become familiarized with the short forced marches, the tedious railway journeys, the hurried digging of trenches, the assault on a village and the battle for a station, the hand-to-hand struggle in a church and the sudden shooting in the streets, squeezed in the shadow of a gateway. They knew what was in store for them tomorrow, as soon as they left the railway, but they did not think of the battle, only of thermometers and mittens, things in general and everyday events, politics and the Revolution. Yes, of the Revolution, which they discussed as if it concerned themselves very little, as if it was happening somewhere else, outside their ranks, and as if they were not at this very moment about to shed their blood for it. Only sometimes, when they got hold of one of the pamphlets or hurriedly produced newspapers, did they become aware that they themselves were the Revolution. In the entire train there was only one person who never for a moment forgot for what, and in whose name, he was fighting, and who told the soldiers so again and again; this was Friedrich.

After three long months, which seemed to him like years, he met up with Berzejev again in Kursk. ‘Whenever I come across you again,’ said Berzejev, ‘you seem different to me! That was already the case when we had to separate repeatedly during our escape. One might say that you change your face even quicker than your name.’ Since his return to Russia, Friedrich had borne the pseudonym under which he had published articles in the newspapers. He did not even confess to Berzejev that, in secret; he loved his new name like a kind of rank conferred by himself. He loved it as the expression of a new existence. He loved the clothing he now wore, the phrases that lay in his brain and on his tongue and which he untiringly uttered and wrote down; for he found a sensual pleasure in the very repetition. A hundred times already he had written the same things in the pamphlets. And each time it was his experience that there were certain words that never grew stale and were rather like bells that always produced the same sound, but also always a fresh awe because they hung so high above the heads of men. There were sounds not shaped by human tongues but which — borne by unknown winds in the midst of thousands of words of earthly speech — had been wafted from other-worldly spheres. There was the word: ‘Freedom!’ A word as vast as the sky, as unattainable by the human hand as a star. Yet created by the yearning of men who ever and again reached out for it, and drunk from the red blood of millions of dead. How many times already he had repeated the phrase: ‘We want a new world!’ And always the phrase was just as new as that which it expressed. And ever and again it fell like a sudden light over a distant land. There was the word: ‘People.’ When he uttered it before the soldiers, before these sailors and peasants and day-labourers and workers whom he regarded as the people, he felt as if he were holding to a light a mirror which magnified it. How he had once striven for newer and more meaningful words when he still gave clever lectures for young workers, and how little there actually was to say. How many useless words speech contained, while the few simple ones were still denied their right, their measure and their reality. Bread was not bread as long as it was not eaten by all, and as long as its sound was accompanied by that of hunger like a body by its shadow. One made do with a few ideas, a few words, and a passion which had no names. It was hate and love at the same time. He thought he was holding it in his hand like a light with which one illuminates and with which one kindles a fire. Killing had become as familiar to him as eating and drinking. There was no other kind of hatred. Annihilate, annihilate! Only what the eye saw dead had disappeared. Only the enemy’s corpse was no longer an enemy. In burnt-out churches one could no longer pray. It seemed that all his powers had rallied together in this one passion like regiments on the battlefield. It embraced the ambition of his youthful days, the hatred for his mother’s uncle and his superiors at the office, the envy of the children of rich homes, the yearning for the world, the foolish expectation of woman, the marvellous bliss with which one merged with her, the bitterness of his lonely hours, his innate malice, his trained intelligence, the sharpness of his eye and even his cowardice and proneness to fear. Yes, anxiety even helped him to win battles. And with that lightning-swift shrewdness by which one is favoured only in the seconds when life itself is at stake he grasped the foreign rules of military strategy. He translated into military tactics what his innate cunning had dictated to him from earliest youth. He became a master of the art of spying out the enemy. He entered the villages and towns of the adversary in many disguises. There were no bounds to the mischievous play of his fantasy, the romantic tendencies of his nature, the perilous excursions dictated by his private curiosity. There was no superior authority to control him in the confusion of this civil war, nor was the enemy well enough organized to initiate a proper campaign according to the proper rules of modern warfare. One overrates danger when one has no experience of it, thought Friedrich. In reality it is a state to which one becomes as accustomed as to a bourgeois life with regular lunch hours. One can actually speak of the commonplaceness of danger. Smiling, he heard Parthagener’s old question sounding in his ears: ‘Was it really necessary?’ and, smiling, answered, ‘Yes! It was really necessary!’ One did not come defenceless, without a homeland and outlawed, into a hostile world and let things go on as they were. One did not possess intelligence to place it at the disposal of stupidity, nor eyes to lead the blind. ‘I could have become a minister!’ he said to Berzejev, not without a little arrogance. ‘Despite everything. We prefer to hang the ministers.’

‘I should have thought you were smarter,’ answered Berzejev. ‘You were so sensibly undecided, so agreeably aimless, so private, without obvious passion …’

Friedrich interrupted him. ‘It is not my world, the one into which I fell by the accident of birth. I had nothing to do in it. Now I have something to do. I always lived with the feeling of having missed my time. I did not know that I was yet to experience it.’

He conducted his own war. He had a personal account to settle with the world. He had his own tactics. Berzejev called them ‘anti-military.’ ‘They are unbourgeois,’ replied Friedrich. ‘Those of the bourgeois generals are wordless, and therefore spiritless. The bourgeois commander fights with the help of orders, we fight with the help of oratory.’ And once again he assembled his comrades for the third time that week and once again uttered the old new words: ‘Freedom’ and ‘New World’!

‘In the Great War your officers ordered you: “Stand to attention!” We, your comrade commanders, shout the opposite at you: “Forward.” Your officers ordered you to hold your tongues. We ask that you shout, “Long live the Revolution!” Your officers ordered you to obey. We entreat you to understand. There they told you: “Die for the Tsar!” And we say to you, “Live! But if you have to die, then die for yourselves!” ‘

Jubilation arose. ‘Long live the Revolution!’ cried the crowd. And Berzejev whispered shyly: ‘You are a demagogue.’

‘I believe every word I say,’ retorted Friedrich.

As soon as they marched into a captured place, he had the arrested bourgeois brought before him. They stood in a line, he studied their faces. A quiet illusion took possession of him. He found resemblances between these strangers and the faces of bourgeois acquaintances. He hated the whole class, as one hates a particular kind of animal. One looked like the writer he had met at Hilde’s, another like Dr Süsskind, who tended to turn up over and over again, a third like the Prussian colonel, a fourth like the Social Democrat party leader. He let them all go again. Once there fell into his hands a harmless bank director whose face seemed familiar. But he could not remember exactly. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked. ‘Kargan,’ whispered the man. ‘Are you a brother of the Trieste Kargan?’ ‘A cousin!’ ‘When you write to him,’ said Friedrich, ‘give him my regards.’ The man feared a trap. ‘I never write to him,’ he said. ‘How large is your fortune?’ asked Friedrich. ‘All lost!’ stammered the man. ‘I had a flourishing business,’ he went on. ‘Fifty employees in the bank! And a small factory!’ ‘In feudal times,’ said Friedrich to Berzejev, ‘a man who ruled over fifty employees was a man. That one there’s a slug, the cousin of my mother’s uncle.’ He noted how the large tears ran down the director’s cheeks.

Once, in the street, he encountered a man who still retained a few remnants of a former elegance. Friedrich stopped. ‘Come on, let him go!’ said Berzejev. ‘I can’t,’ said Friedrich, ‘I must recall whom he looks like.’ The man began to run. They pursued him, held him fast. Friedrich scrutinized him closely. ‘Now I know!’ he exclaimed, and turned the stranger loose. ‘He looks like the operetta composer, L. Do you recall the photograph in the illustrated magazines? He has the same waltzing expression.’ And satisfied, he began to sing: ‘There are things one must forget, they are too beautiful to be true. …’

Of course, he did not know that he himself was gradually beginning to become a feature of the illustrated and non-illustrated newspapers of the bourgeois world, the greater part of which was not nearly annihilated. He did not know that the correspondents of ten great powers telegraphed his name whenever they had nothing else to report and that he was seized on by the mighty machinery of public opinion, that mechanism which manufactures sensations, the raw material of world history. He read no newspapers. He did not know that every third day he featured in the series of men who formed a constant column in the press under the title ‘The bloody executioners’, alongside the columns about boxers, composers of operettas, long-distance runners, child prodigies and aviators. He underrated — like all the more judicious of his comrades — the mysterious technique of the defence mechanism of society, which lay in making the extraordinary ordinary by exaggeration or by going into detail, and by letting it be established through a thousand ‘well-informed sources’ that the riddles of history consisted of real events. He did not know that this world had grown too old for ecstasy, and that technique could master the material of legend to transform eternal verities into current affairs. He forgot that there were gramophones to reproduce the thunders of history, and that the cinema could recall blood-baths as well as horse-races.

He was naïve, for he was a revolutionary.

2

Thanks to the extraordinary length of time the war had taken to run its course, many letters had stayed so long in the post that they did not reach their destination for years. The letter that Friedrich had written to Hilde in the winter of 1915 was received by her in the spring of 1919, at a time when she had long ceased to be Fräulein Hilde von Maerker and was now the wife of Herr Leopold Derschatta, or von Derschatta, which he was no longer entitled to call himself after the Austrian revolution. Nevertheless, he was called Herr Generaldirektor since no one is willingly deprived of his rank in the Middle European countries, and since one feels just as respected for the title that may be spoken by others as for that which one bears oneself.

Herr von Derschatta had in fact been a Director General during the last two years of the war, having been sent back from the field as a lieutenant in the reserve, with a minor gunshot wound of the elbow which he had quite unnecessarily exposed to the enemy above the parapet. His enemies — for a Director General always has enemies — maintained that he knew what he was doing. But let us pay no attention to his enemies! Their calumnies are unimportant. Even if we assume that the gunshot wound had been no accident, what help was a gunshot wound to anyone? How many did a gunshot wound save from returning to the field? No, Herr von Derschatta, who had become a railway station commandant like Hilde’s father at the outbreak of war, although he should not have remained behind the front at his age, and who only went into the field as the result of an oversight for which a major at the War Office later had to make amends — this Herr von Derschatta needed no gunshot wound. He had protection. His family, who came from Moravia, had produced government officials for generations, ministerial advisers, officers, and only one single Derschatta had shown talent and become an actor — and he bore another name. Connections with one of the oldest families in the land originated with great-grandfather Derschatta, who had been a simple steward of a count’s estates. What a piece of luck for the great-grandson! For the descendant of that count was now a powerful man in the government and whoever called himself his friend did not have to dread the war. When Herr von Derschatta left hospital with his arm finally healed, he had resolved not to visit the front again. He betook himself, his arm still in the black bandage for appearance’s sake, to the office where his friend ruled. He strode without stopping — as if he represented his own fate — though long, empty and echoing passages and other narrow corridors in which whole swarms of civilian rabble waited for passports, permits and identification papers, he saluted lackadaisically whenever an usher jumped to his feet who — thanks to a vocational capacity for presentiment — immediately divined that here there wandered a lieutenant with connections, and, after some enquiries, reached his friend’s door. He remained in friendly conversation for exactly ten minutes: ‘Excellency,’ he said, ‘may I be permitted. …’

‘I know already,’ Excellency replied, ‘I received the letter from Herr Papa. What’s new? What’s Fini up to?’

‘Your Excellency is very kind,’ said Herr von Derschatta.

‘As always, as always!’ opined His Excellency. ‘A splendid young woman!’

And as the lieutenant rose, the Count, as if by chance, as if he were thinking aloud about something that had nothing at all to do with his guest, let fall the words: ‘All settled tomorrow.’

Thereby the Count meant nothing other than the Potato Board, whose task it was to check free enterprise in potatoes and to prevent profiteering. The Potato Board at that time was still run by an expert, one of the richest farmers, who, despite his fitness for service in the field, had already been thrice designated as indispensable and who, unluckily for him, had not looked up his protector in the Food Ministry for six months. Out of sight, out of mind! When the military had recently claimed the greengrocer, he was — to the surprise even of the military — no longer regarded as indispensable. It was Herr von Derschatta who had become indispensable instead. And with the manifest reason that in such serious times a Potato Board must be subordinate to the War Minister no less than to the Minister for Food, the lieutenant, as a member of the Army, was allocated to establish a lasting liaison between the War Minister and the fruit of the earth.

From now on Herr von Derschatta called himself Director General, although it was not expressly made known that this was his title. Could one possibly have called him Lieutenant in such serious times, when every other lawyer was a lieutenant? Someone, some day uttered the title Director General Derschatta, and from then on he was known as Director General Derschatta. Indeed, some weeks later there reappeared that farmer who had once reigned as indispensable. But in what a pitiable state! He had had to drill for four weeks, that is, until his family had found satisfactory protection. He was finally restored to his potatoes, no longer as sovereign but as Derschatta’s technical adviser, and had to content himself with the title of Director.

Derschatta, who was by nature a prudent man, did not enjoy seeing the farmer in his vicinity. Two men fit for war service in proximity did not go down well. Besides, he badly needed a secretary and equally feared to deprive the trenches of three men. He therefore began by attempting to dislodge the farmer. But the latter sat fast. Thereupon he relinquished his claim to a male secretary and decided to remain on the lookout for a female substitute.

Hilde, who had long since tired of being a sick-nurse, and who considered that employment with the Red Cross was more a tribute to her benevolence than fitting for her intellect, had for some months been seeking a post in the public service, one — as it were — as the right hand of an important man. Frau G., her friend, who knew Herr Derschatta, brought Hilde to his notice. Herr von Derschatta treasured womanly charm. And as, in those serious times, it was no longer unusual for daughters from good homes to sit at typewriters, thus serving the Fatherland as well as emancipation, Hilde rapidly learned to type and became a lady secretary.

She was proud, according to the usage of her times, thereby to ‘earn her bread’. Her father had grown tired, worn down by the admonitions of his housekeeper, whom he had still not yet married, and by the opposition of his daughter; he was already weary of his post at the railway station, the war was going on too long for his liking, he longed for his quiet office again, the peaceful clubroom, a crisp poppy-seed croissant, his stomach was so upset by the maize flour and, in a word, he allowed his daughter to become a secretary without opposition.

He would not have done so, despite his tiredness, if he had been more closely acquainted with Herr von Derschatta — and also, of course, with his daughter. For Hilde, who was as convinced of the absurdity of the old morality as she was of her own self-sufficiency, was enraptured by the discovery made by girls of the middle class during the war — that a woman could dispose of her body as she wished, and, if only to comply with theory, offered no resistance at all to the demands made by Herr Derschatta on his secretary. It was an era in which women, while they were abused, were motivated by the concept that they were obliged to do something by which they differed from their mothers. While the conservatives bemoaned the notorious laxity of morals, virginity was remarked on by the men as a rare phenomenon and regarded by the flappers as an encumbrance. Many women derived no pleasure at all because they practised sexual intercourse as an obligation, and because their pride in venturing to love like men satisfied them more than love itself. Herr von Derschatta did not need to feign love. Hilde’s ambition to be able to assess men only by their physical prowess, in the same way as men formed their opinions of women, made any exertions on Derschatta’s part unnecessary from the outset as far as she was concerned. Without a trace of passion or pleasure, simply on grounds of principle, Hilde had relations with the Director General, naturally in office hours, because she could then at the same time retain the awareness of being the ‘right hand’ of an important functionary. If anything really attracted her in this adventure, it was curiosity. But even in the curiosity there was mingled a kind of investigating scientific zeal. And the love hours passed like the office hours, from which they were in a sense subtracted, in a cool concupiscence that felt like the brown leather of the office sofa on which they were consummated. Meanwhile the yellow pencil and typist’s notebook lay on the carpet awaiting further employment, for the Director General did not like to waste time and began to dictate even while he was engaged in satisfying the requirements of hygiene at the tap. It was, one might say, a love idyll on the Pitman system and corresponded completely to the seriousness of the times and the danger that beset the Fatherland.

It would certainly have remained without consequence if it had not become involved with the fate of a clerk named Wawrka. Wawrka had been indispensable until Derschatta’s arrival and had grown accustomed to regarding war as an event that did not endanger his life. But the Director General, who, in that very context, was disposed to have as few healthy men around him as possible, annulled Wawrka’s indispensability. The latter, in a long audience, implored the Director General for clemency. The poor man fell on his knees before the great Derschatta. He invoked his numerous family, his six children — he had invented two more for the emergency — his sick wife, who of course was really perfectly well. But the Director General’s concern for his own life rendered him even more unyielding than he was by nature; it was settled: Wawrka had to join up.

The poor man resolved on revenge. He knew who Hilde’s father was and, with his simple brain, which did not appreciate the philosophy of an emancipated young woman, assumed that the goings-on on the sofa which he had overheard must be the result of a seduction in the good old style. With persons of consequence, he thought in his innocence, there is an honour which one forfeits, protects, avenges in a duel or with pistol-shots. He already saw the Director General lying dead in the office with a bullet in the temple, old Herr von Maerker beside him, broken but proud and silent, and — most important of all — he himself again indispensable and preserved. And he went to Herr von Maerker and related to him what he had detected and overheard. Basically, Herr von Maerker’s views did not differ from those of Wawrka. The precepts of social honour required a ministerial adviser and cavalry officer to call his daughter’s seducer to account. And with the matter-of-course attitude of a man who has no misgivings about his daughter but the traditions of an old chivalry in his blood, Herr von Maerker betook himself, horsewhip in hand, to the Director General.

Herr von Derschatta was determined not to die at any price, either at the front or behind the lines. To save his life he played the confessed sinner, but also the anguished lover, and begged Herr von Maerker for his daughter’s hand. Hilde would have preferred to pursue her sexual freedom but realized that she must avert a catastrophe. She made a sacrifice to prejudice, got married, and consoled herself with the prospect of a free modern marriage in which both parties could do as they wished.

But she was wrong. For her husband, who had formerly shared her views of sexual freedom for women, suddenly regarded marriage as a sacred institution and was determined, as he said, to preserve ‘the honour of his home’. Yes, he even became jealous. He kept his wife under surveillance. He engaged a new secretary and pursued his normal practices with her. Wawrka went to the front and had probably fallen in the meantime. Hilde, however, got a child. It was simply a precautionary measure on her husband’s part. She took it as a sign of her humiliation. Thus, with Nature’s help, he had demonstrated to her that it was a wife’s lot to be unfree and a vessel for posterity. She hated the child, a boy, who resembled his father with malice aforethought. Now she was surrounded by two Derschattas. When the one went to the office, the other screamed in the cradle. Often they both slept in her bed. She had nobody in the world. She could not talk to her father, he did not understand what she said. Her only friend, Frau G., gave her cheap advice. She should betray her husband. That was the sole revenge. But Herr von Derschatta was mistrustful and prudent and a domestic tyrant of the old style. And far and wide there was no man with whom it would have been worthwhile breaking the marriage. For Hilde had become more critical. Misfortune makes one choosy.

Then came the Revolution. Herr von Derschatta lost his connections, his rank and his nobility. He had never had a vocation. It was necessary to cut down. The children’s nurse was dismissed and a cheap cook engaged. One gave no social evenings and went to no parties. Herr von Derschatta lost his secretaries and concentrated his entire manliness on his wife. He became even more jealous. A second child arrived, a son, just as much like his father as the first and just as much hated by Hilde. Herr von Derschatta plunged into commerce. He developed connections with members of the odious but clever race of Jewish financiers. At the instance of one of these he removed to Berlin, in order to act for his principal on the money markets of German cities. No one had any confidence in his expertise. But, in the opinion of rich but ill-favoured men, he had a distinguished appearance and ‘cut a good figure’ in Germany. No drop of Jewish blood could be detected in him. And he was a nobleman.

He made his living by tenuous deals, which he barely grasped. He consorted with stout individuals whom he despised and whom he simultaneously respected and feared. He attempted to learn their ‘dodges’. For he believed they were dodges. He did not realize that generations of ancestors subjected to pogroms and martyrdom, confined in the ghetto and compelled to banking transactions, were requisite to making deals. He became one of those furtive antisemites who begin to hate out of respect and who say to themselves a thousand times a day, whenever a deal goes against them and whenever they believe themselves outwitted: ‘If I were to have my life over again, I would be a Jew.’ A great part of his bad humour arose from the fact that it was so difficult to be born again. And because he could not discuss his private worries with business friends and acquaintances, he poured out his heart to Hilde. She let him talk, she did not comfort him, she actually rejoiced in his bad luck. She was haughty and spiteful. The Director General who, with the adroitness of a weakling, approved the principles of the new world and despised those of the old one, which was what he called a ‘reorientation’, indicated that his marriage had been an over-hasty affair and the result of a reactionary outlook. He thought of his marriage as he did of his patriotism and his war decoration and his monarchistic opinions. From the whole of that world, which had so rapidly collapsed, he had salvaged nothing but this stupid marriage, whose basis had been a stupid principle of honour. Today? Today no reasonable man would enter into a discussion with an old blockhead of a ministerial adviser over the honour of his daughter. Pistols, horsewhips, duels, formalities! What a performance! ‘If I had not married Hilde,’ he thought bitterly, ‘I might now have got hold of the daughter of a rich Jew. Blond Aryans are highly sought after.’ Often he worked himself into a rage. He no longer had a uniform or a title or any position of standing. No precepts anywhere could force him to practise restraint. He let himself go. A door slammed, a chair fell over, his fist pounded on the table, the hanging-lamp began to shake gently. Hilde opened her eyes wide. Already grief choked her, the tears began to smart at the corners of her eyes. ‘Anything rather than cry,’ she thought, ‘anything rather than cry in front of him! I shall try instead to be surprised, just surprised. What an animal. A butcher.’ First the nape of his neck reddened, then the blood mounted from behind into his face. Small hairs sprouted on the backs of his broad hands. She must think of someone quickly, thought was a comfort in itself. And she thought of her father, who restrained himself a hundred times a day, who was doubly polite when he fell into a silent rage, who left the house when he had something unpleasant to say. Father! But he was old and foolish and had never understood her. Even if he were here now, he would at most shoot it out with her husband.

She remembered Friedrich. She no longer saw him distinctly. She remembered him, but not as a living human being, rather as a kind of ‘interesting phenomenon’. A young idealist, a revolutionary. And not even consistent. In the end he was like the others. ‘He must have enlisted and has probably been killed,’ she thought.

She had not ceased thinking of Friedrich when the Director General succeeded, the inflation overcome, in obtaining an impressive and prominent position as manager of the office of a steel combine in Berlin, and in acquiring the improved mood that befitted the circumstances.

One day the maid brought her a letter. The envelope was studded with many postmarks. The comments of many postal officials criss-crossed at the edges. The round postmarks lay like medals on someone’s chest. The letter was like a warrior who had emerged from a heated engagement. It bore her old address, her maiden name, for which she yearned, and she regarded the letter with that tenderness with which she so often recalled her girlhood days. It was, in any case, a delightful letter. It had sought her out after long endeavour and fruitless journeys, it was a loyal devoted letter. ‘It comes from one who is long dead,’ she thought, and redoubled her tenderness at this notion. She carefully cut it open. It was Friedrich’s last letter.

From the first word he was at once close to her. She recalled his gait, his greeting, his gestures, his voice, his silence, his hand. His face she no longer saw distinctly. She felt his timid touch on her arm, she smelled the scent of the evening rain through which they had walked together, and saw the twilight in the little café. A sudden pang checked her recollections. He was dead. He had perished in the confusion of the times. Dead in some prison, starved, executed. ‘I should go into mourning,’ she thought, ‘put on mourning. He was the only real man I ever met. And look how I treated him!’

But when her husband entered the room her mourning had disappeared or had been relegated to the background, or overlaid with a bright triumph. The Director General was puzzled by his wife’s good humour. She irritated him, he did not know why. What reason could she have for being so cheerful? ‘I’ve had enough irritations already today. I’ll spoil her mood.’ And aloud: ‘Why are you so exuberant?’ She looked at him and did not reply. She did not feel the choking pain and she was sure that she would not cry. The letter lay in the drawer and radiated secret strength. Derschatta’s sons came in from their daily outing. They had healthy red empty faces and squabbled eternally. She sent the children away with’ the maid. She ate nothing. For the first time she noticed exactly how her husband behaved at table. He must have learned as a child how to hold a knife and fork and yet he ate like a savage. His gaze wandered over the narrow columns of the unfolded newspaper and his spoon rose gropingly, like a blind man, to his mouth. Although he seemed preoccupied with some item of news, this in no way lessened his comfortable enjoyment in eating. ‘What an appetite!’ thought Hilde, as if appetite were a degrading quality. ‘How remarkably some people behave.’ She felt as if her husband were a stranger, whom she had met in a restaurant. He was no concern of hers. She was free.

How could she set about discovering something about Friedrich’s fate? If she were bolder, she could go out into the world, travel to Russia to seek him out. She discarded this romantic idea. Yet it seemed to her that nothing one felt was fanciful when one loved. What could be more remarkable than what she had experienced already? Their first encounters, his departure, his imprisonment in Siberia, his return, his disappearance, and finally this letter! Did it not come to her as if guided from heaven? Was it perhaps a cry for help, which she heard too late? It was all miraculous, there was no doubt, and it was not for her to flinch from an improbable task.

3

When he stood at the lectern and addressed the young people, the burden of his experiences oppressed him and he felt old, as if he were a hundred. Often, at home, he looked in the mirror and persuaded himself that his face was no older than ten years ago. The youth and health of the others, however, seemed to be a reflection of attitudes rather than physical characteristics. They were six, eight or ten years younger than he. They understood what he told them with ease. And yet, with each sentence he thought: ‘I’m serving as a textbook of history here, and not even an orthodox one.’ Often a small word betrayed the former rebel in him. Then he would feel a shudder passing rapidly over the backs of his listeners. He paused. He felt as if he must suddenly stop short, from lack of words. Passion had been taken by surprise. None of these young men had walked, lonely and hostile, through the streets of cities as he had. Singing and carrying flags, they marched to fêtes, lectures and meetings. Like conquerors, they entered into the inheritance of a new world, but they had conquered nothing and they were only heirs. They no longer needed to answer hatred with hatred. Not one of them need be homeless and wretched any longer. Sorrow was banned, a reactionary institution. A new race was to arise, it was already here, with happy muscles, sunny eyes, fearless because there were no terrors now and brave because no dangers threatened. He had not grown old, it was just that the world had become new, as if he had lived a thousand years. And he learned to experience the slow indifference of the elderly, which gradually spreads over their bodies and soon covers the living like a shroud. The pains came like muffled noises, the pleasures kept a respectful distance, delights he already experienced in the past even as he tasted them, like their own traces left behind years ago. They were recollections of delights.

It was probably the same for the others, his comrades and contemporaries, but they immersed themselves in work. They sat at the desks which had replaced the throne as the furniture of those in government. They wrote and read and avoided the streets. Their windows looked out over the distant outskirts of the city or into the courtyards of the Kremlin. They saw either the mist of the fields, mingled with the smoke of a few factory chimneys, or a plot of grass, a few Red Army sentinels and an occasional official visitor. They travelled through the towns in closed cars. Health and disease, mortality and birth rate, hunger and satiety, crime and passion, homelessness and drunkenness, illiteracy and schools, backwardness and genius, all figured in the reports, and even what was described as the ‘popular morale’ acquired the physiognomy of a statistic. And everyone prophesied good things to come. Optimism became the prime duty. With their old tired faces, their sick bodies, their shortsighted, much-afflicted eyes, the old endeavoured to copy the cheerful speech and athletic sprightliness of the young, and they resembled fathers who had been taken on excursions by their sons.

‘People are altogether changed,’ said Friedrich to Berzejev.

‘Do you still remember R.? Even he has become an optimist. He abandons his books and goes down to the soldiers for an hour. “What splendid fellows!” he says then. They treat him like a raw egg and allow him to pat them on the back. He, who once said that he feared the canaille, and that I ought to fear them too, is as happy as a child. The ordinary people have a sound instinct, they know what suits R. And so they do him a favour and say something offensive to him. He is delighted. He collects these mock-familiarities as a courtier did the gracious remarks of majesty in times gone by. And the soldiers oblige him by acting “The Sovereign People”. Then he returns happily to his books and is convinced that he is no different from the masses. He has evidence of it. They have spoken to him frankly. He has slapped their massive shoulders with his soft fingers and they have told him openly that they have no confidence in his style of government. The people have taken to play-acting splendidly.’

‘If the simple understanding I learned at my military academy qualifies me at all to understand what actually makes a bourgeois,’ said Berzejev, ‘I would say that our comrades have become bourgeois. Probably they always were. It was only the tension and hostility and the poverty in which they lived that inhibited their bourgeois instincts. Now the tension is over. I consider that the characteristic feature of the bourgeois is optimism. Everything will be alright. We shall soon conquer. The general knows what to do. The enemy is done for. My wife’s as true as gold. Things are improving, and so on. Now they have flats with furniture and water-closets, and the children play in the corridors and get on at school. Have you seen how Savelli has installed himself? Oh, not extravagantly! It’s not what the newspapers of the bourgois countries throw in our teeth. Alas, our comrades despise luxury. But they have a passionate inclination towards bourgeois comfort and knick-knacks. They say that Savelli has become very ferocious. He is responsible for eighty per cent of the executions. I was with him a week ago. He had bought himself floral teacups. He doesn’t drink tea out of a glass any more. Someone has brought him a marvellous machine from Germany for making real Turkish coffee. He explained to me for a quarter of an hour how it’s made and said, full of amazement, “The Germans are really brilliant fellows!” An American journalist went to visit him. He treated the American very well, that is very badly, in a superior manner. Often he replied to some question of the American’s with: “That’s no concern of yours!” or “Tell your boss that we treat bourgeois journalists much more kindly than they deserve.” But when the American had left, Savelli said after a few minutes’ reflection: “A fine nation, these Americans. They know exactly what they want.” Just wait two years, and Savelli will tell the Americans as much to their face.’

‘In the whole of Russia,’ said Friedrich, ‘how many are there still who talk as we do? The people who fought with us have disappeared, have gone home, are townsfolk and workers and clerks again. How few have remained with us! They’re starting to reorganize the army. People already treat our kind with respect. A comrade gave me his seat on the tram. I’m getting old, we’re all getting old.’

A week later R. said to Friedrich:

‘It would probably be best for you not to stay in Moscow with your pessimism. One of our people has suggested that you should go to the Volga district.’

‘Don’t lie to me!’ exclaimed Friedrich. ‘Admit that it’s you who suggested it.’

‘Alright then, I suggested it! I wanted to spare you any awkwardness.’

‘Nobody asked you to. I shall stay here as long as I like.’

‘You won’t succeed,’ said R. ‘You’ll go, voluntarily or involuntarily, Savelli will see to that. Besides, have you read my article? I have written an attack on pessimism. Naturally, I mean you and your lot.’

‘Do you recall,’ said Friedrich, ‘what you told me about Savelli in Vienna? You thought that he would hang us!’

‘I was talking about a different Savelli. There is a difference. Savelli was powerless. And today — he no longer even uses his old name — he is no longer powerless.’

‘And you are telling me this because you’re afraid?’

‘Not afraid. Out of caution. And conviction. Savelli must not know of our discussion. What’s more, I warn you not to mention it to anyone at all.’

‘Speak plainly! You’re saying that you’ve taken it on yourself to get me out of the way, gently. You’re saying that you’re all afraid I might be ambitious. I’m not, any more. I don’t care a damn for your Revolution.’

‘So much the better. Then get away quickly. But don’t tell anyone. I shall never admit that I’ve spoken to you.’

‘But I heard your discussion,’ suddenly exclaimed Berzejev. He had opened the door, so that they could see the corridor.

‘I’ve been standing here for half an hour listening to you.’

He approached R. and raised his hand. R. ducked. Berzejev’s blow struck his ear. The next moment he sat under the table and cried: ‘Either calm down or go away!’

They went away.

‘I shall probably go to Germany,’ said Friedrich. ‘You’ll come with me, of course?’

‘No!’ said Berzejev. ‘We shall separate. You mustn’t be angry. I have to tell you frankly that I can’t leave Russia. I am happy to be able to live here in safety. Safely for the first time since my youth and with nothing to hide. This is my country. I love it. I was homesick when I was abroad. I can’t live abroad again. In a word — I’m staying.’

‘If I were in your place,’ said Friedrich slowly, ‘I should feel compelled to accompany my friend.’ I have no country, he thought quietly. He was too abashed to formulate it. But Berzejev guessed. ‘I’m only a Russian,’ he said — and it sounded like a reproach. ‘I’ve learned nothing. I can only remain in the army. What could I do abroad? I’d only be a nuisance to you. …’ ‘Farewell!’ said Friedrich. He gave him his hand, they embraced each other — lingeringly, as if each still had something to say to the other, something that could no longer be uttered. As if, still embracing, they were separated by an immense space, as if they stood on opposite shores of a lake, looked at each other, and realized that they could not catch each other’s words and that there was no point in articulating them.

And three days later Friedrich again stood alone in a great station and awaited a train to the West.

It was already dusk. Soldiers who had been ordered to the frontier were sitting in the carriage. They were discussing politics.

‘In Germany,’ said one, ‘it’ll only take a week before the Revolution breaks out. Then it will happen in France, then in England, and last of all in America.’

‘Blockhead,’ said the other. ‘Who told you that?’

‘I was at a lecture that R. gave to the students.’

‘What nonsense,’ said the other. ‘First, you didn’t understand the lecture, second, it probably had a special meaning, and third, R. is a Jew and I no longer believe a word he says. A few days ago, when I was on duty at T., he spoke to us.’

‘Jew or not, we’re finished with all that, there’s no religion any more.’

‘But there are still blockheads, since you’re still alive,’ cried a third and they all roared.

‘Who are the clever ones, then?’ asked Friedrich. They mentioned three names which echoed through Russia and the world. Finally, one mentioned the name that Savelli had now adopted. Several agreed with him.

‘A splendid man,’ he said. ‘He knows what has to be done. I came across him once in a corridor in the X-department. The corridor was narrow and dark, I stepped back to let him pass, I greeted him, he raised his head, did not reply, only looked at me with his eyes made of night and ice. I felt cold all over. He knows what he wants. Most of the clever Jews only speak prophecies, and that is on account of the radio, just because the ignorant peasants in the villages all listen. And so one never hears anything clever any more, it’s all kept for the radio.’

‘Yes,’ exclaimed another, ‘I often think that the comrades take us for stupider than we are. They say something quite simple a hundred times. I know it by heart already. In the paper they always write the same thing, too.’

‘Why should I care what they say?’ thought Friedrich. ‘I’m beginning a new life.’

4

But he began his new life as if he had already lived it once before. He knew it. He set foot in it like an actor on the stage in a part he has already played on many evenings, in the vague hope of some untoward incident of a minor nature which, through an emergency, assumes the nature of a sensation. He even hoped for minor misfortunes, an arrest, expulsion, perhaps a jail sentence.

Anyone else in his position would have thought of a revolution. He was surprised that the war did not recommence. When he arrived at M., the mid-German town where he had spent a few rainy days during the war, he noted that it was still raining. In the large windows of the café there still hung notices asserting that Frenchmen, Englishmen, Poles and other nationalities were unwelcome on the premises. The school was of red brick and when one passed by in the morning a chorus of clear children’s voices could be heard singing Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden. In the centre stood the red-brick church. The tax office was made of red brick. The town hall was constructed of red bricks. And although all these buildings veered towards prettiness, and seemed to have been assembled as in a game by some sort of oversized children, they nevertheless betrayed a tendency to eternity, like the Pyramids. After five or six years it was still raining. The tram still shuttled to and fro. Only the conductress had returned to hearth and home. The women still wore the same hats. Where was the comrade who, in those days, had arranged his first genuine false passport? He was alive. He had become naturalized in the meantime and been made a member of parliament. And where was the party leader? He was a member of the administration in Berlin. And, although the Communist tailor was now the furious political opponent of that Social Democratic party leader, it seemed to Friedrich, because he had not witnessed events at close quarters, that both, the Communist and the party leader, were engaged in a consistent and parallel ascent like officers or government officials who attained a higher grade after a certain period of service. And although they had both attained their rank in fighting against each other, the ironic fate that is a special feature of radical politicians conferred on them a frightening resemblance. Like the Jews, who always turn to the east when they pray, the revolutionaries always turned to the right when they began to act publicly. However radical the tailor might be, it did not affect this rule. Every month he seriously expected the revolution. He should have served a prison sentence on account of an insult he had hurled at the party leader, and he had to thank his parliamentary immunity for his present freedom. Twenty years earlier the insulted one had found himself in the same situation. But both seemed to have forgotten it. ‘Who knows,’ thought Friedrich, ‘twenty years from now my comrade will be insulted and complain. The Revolution always remained on the left; only its champions always turned to the right.’ ‘Last week,’ related the tailor, ‘two policemen had to remove me forcibly from parliament. You should have seen the goings-on! Oh, things aren’t always as peaceful for us as people in Moscow sometimes make out! We are just on the verge of a railway strike. The Party is working at full stretch. We’ve gained five thousand members in Hamburg. Here, in M., we’re strongly represented. We can count on fifty-five per cent of the factory workers. The party funds come in absolutely on time. And twice or three times a week we have our evenings.’ ‘What a local kind of patriotism this comrade has!’ thought Friedrich. ‘It’s on this basis that love of the fatherland is built. He is proud of the district that has elected him. It won’t take much to make him take even the reactionary parties of his constituency under his wing and consider them better than the reactionaries of other constituencies. Here I have an opportunity, no longer rare these days, to be present at the birth of a kind of local patriotism, love of constituency, ab ovo. He considers his communists the most revolutionary. And how he’s changed! He now wears a Russian blouse. The last time I was here, he was still wearing an unassuming shirt without a collar. And just as the men who make a bourgeois career acquire a double chin and a paunch, so the men who are my comrades procure a revolutionary costume and a briefcase. A few years ago he still had a hat. Now he wears a sports cap. Then he still wore his hair parted, now he combs it backwards. And he himself is unaware of this. His revolutionary posture develops as insidiously as a double chin. This comrade is reliable.’

He looked up the former party leader in the diplomatic post he now held. He was living ‘according to his station’. The hall looked almost like that of the illustrious Herr von Maerker. Only the party leader’s study had remained the same. Modesty is a virtue. The paperknife, shaped like a cavalry sabre, still lay on the desk. A small dome bulged over the ink-well, which resembled a mosque. The forget-me-not frames still surrounded the two sons in uniform, although happily they had returned home. And the only new object was the large oil-painting of the party leader, painted by one of the leading portraitists of the Reich. What did it matter to the painter? He painted, painted without stopping. Once the Kaiser, twice the beloved general, once a radical. Art had nothing to do with politics. The painters wanted to be left alone in their studios. Art was Christmas, a holiday when all hearts beat in the same rhythm. How handsome the party leader was in the portrait, with his gaze directed to the future of the Fatherland, his right hand supported on the corner of the desk and his left toying with an iron watch-chain, which he had substituted for the gold one! No doubt about it, it was painted grey, it was made of iron. And he did not look like a party leader, but like a leader of parties. The Kaiser had known none, but he knew them all. ‘We have a passionate interest in Russia,’ he began. And, with the satisfaction of a man who speaks in the name of his country, he cited Bismarck, whose reminiscences he had read in all objectivity. Ah, he had always been a non-party man! The Fatherland, like painting, had nothing to do with politics. ‘In Germany,’ replied Friedrich, ‘the so-called Left will probably only succeed in a hundred years in being unrelenting towards their opponents. They are unable to hate. They are unable to become excited. It is their most zealous endeavour, not to defeat the enemy but to understand him. Eventually they come to know him so well that they own him to be right and can no longer attack him.’

The party leader wandered off into the wide domains of world history. It was evident that he saw himself as speaking from a tribune, and that he treated a solitary listener as an entire assembly. He loved it because he did not for a moment forget that he himself was a representative while unfailingly regarding the other, too, as a representative, and he magnified the importance he was wont to ascribe to himself by also attributing great importance to his partner. In the constant hope that each of his utterances was fitted to become a winged word, he now stressed the simple phrases and commonplaces that he had recited to Friedrich years before without pretension and as if by rote, as if they were original ideas. He had evidently, and at the first glance, remained his old self. He still appeared to be wearing the same rust-brown double-breasted jacket, and his trousers still fell in wide folds over wide smooth solid boots, the like of which were no longer to be found in shoe-maker’s shop-windows and consequently looked as if they had been sought for long and zealously. But the very care the man took to be humble echoed the diligence he employed to play a central part in the history of the times. And when he repeated again and again: ‘If only they’d listened to me then,’ or ‘Of course things turned out as I prophesied,’ or ‘The rashness which I have always condemned,’ he appeared to be convinced that his prescience justified the sturdy neglect of his dress. And when, from time to time, he spoke of his country as ‘we’, he believed himself to be equally discreet and blameless in his speech. And yet his ‘we’, his ‘our’, his ‘us’ recalled the way in which the employees of a large department store identify themselves with their firm even though they do not share their master’s income.

Some time later Friedrich was to encounter the party leader at a large assembly of politicians, journalists, diplomats and industrialists, one of those ambassadorial entertainments which are termed ‘a congenial gathering’ in professional circles and newspaper reports. All the men had donned tails, the uniform of congeniality. They ate sandwiches over whose butter was stretched a regular lattice of anchovy strips. Each held a plate or a cup or an empty glass in his hand without knowing why, and all sought discreetly and in vain for a place where they might dispose of these implements. Crafty guests betook themselves to the vicinity of the window-ledges and removed themselves after having deposited their plate in a perilous place, with meek expressions and in the slight anxiety that it might soon fall down and shatter. They only breathed freely when they had gained the opposite corner. The majority, however, stayed riveted to their plates and were consequently unable to be vivacious. The congeniality went from strength to strength.

Friedrich ran into a number of people here whom he had known well in Zürich. He even saw Bernardin and Dr Schleicher again. They had both become diplomats and maintained their understanding. They had sealed an alliance for life, were inseparable, and promenaded silently together because they had no more to say to each other. They had talked themselves out. They knew everything about one another. Now they were united by the memory of their bartered confessions. They were peace comrades just as two men who once met in the trenches were war comrades. Each also represented his country. And as both were concerned with so-called peaceful relations between Germany and France, and as they might have been reproached with remissness for any clouding of these relations, they both cherished peace like their own careers and their ambition accorded it the value that generals accord to war. And just as professional marriage-brokers are concerned about the bliss of the parties they have brought together, because their living depends on it, so Dr Schleicher and Bernardin were similarly concerned about peace between the two countries. They trafficked in peace as they had trafficked in state secrets during the war. Their friendship was troubled only if the name of one of them was mentioned in the newspapers more often than that of the other, or if, in the group photographs of conference participants published in the illustrated magazines, the face of one was more distinctly recognizable than that of his friend. This ‘congenial gathering’ too was taken by a photographer for publicity purposes, to appear under the title ‘A diplomatic tea-party’ in the Sunday supplements. Bernardin and Dr Schleicher separated, since they took it for diplomatic subtlety not to let their association become apparent to the other nations. While they stationed themselves in the background with heroic modesty, they pressed their faces between the shoulders of the front row so as to appear on the plate nonetheless. And furtively but persistently, in their anxiety at the crucial moment when the flash blazed out, they would discard the facial expressions they had donned as advantageous, cast sidelong glances at each other, and consider which of them was standing in a better and more prominent position. The journalists, whose vocation is ever to scent out secrets, believed that the glances of the two were the equivalent of abbreviated diplomatic Notes. And every reporter who spotted this exchange of glances thought at once of the possibility of drawing attention to it in the morning paper under the magic formula of ‘as rumoured in exclusive circles’.

There was only one journalist at this gathering who considered it unworthy to pay attention to glances. This was the Dr Süsskind whom Friedrich had encountered on the train years before. To be sure, Dr Süsskind did not recognize his old travelling companion. But, even if he had recognized Friedrich, it would probably not have prevented him from remarking very audibly to one of the press attachés who had become so common after the war, and who were initiating the era of democracy: ‘When I was in Austria during the war, I realized at once that we should lose the war. Perhaps you remember what I wrote after the breakthrough at Gorlice?’ And as the press attaché, who was not yet sufficiently versed in diplomacy to succeed in being tactful, said ‘No!’, Dr Süsskind went into a detailed account of his article which had revealed a prophetic pessimism. Friedrich recalled the journalist’s optimism in the train. ‘I once had the pleasure,’ he said to Dr Süsskind, ‘of meeting you.’ ‘I certainly don’t remember it,’ said the candid journalist, for whom truth came first. ‘You were sitting in the train with a Prussian colonel and an Austrian major,’ persisted Friedrich. ‘Quite right,’ said Dr Süsskind, ‘but I never noticed you.’ There was no point in talking to him. As if his primary concern, before embarking on a conversation, was to fathom whether Friedrich was telling the truth, he repeated once more: ‘I certainly didn’t notice you!’ ‘Yes,’ said Friedrich, to jolt the other’s memory, ‘your wife was waiting for you at K.’ ‘Ah,’ replied Süsskind bleakly, ‘that was not my wife, that was my sister-in-law.’ And that disposed of the matter.

It was in no way remarkable to encounter Dr Süsskind’s stubborn matter-of-factness in the realm of this newly hatched diplomacy. The legacy of the career diplomats who had brought about the war through folly, ambition, an unthinking pleasure in the secret game, but who at least displayed the social forms as natural qualities, fell after the war to the bourgeois intellectuals — editors, men of letters, teachers and judges — men who, with an incurable love of sincerity, endeavoured to copy the traditional tricks of international politics, and who could be seen from a mile away as striving to safeguard a so-called state secret. With diplomatic passports, for which they themselves had more respect than the customs officcials, they crossed the frontiers hiding in their sealed bags lace for their wives and liqueurs for their guests, in conformity with the familiar behaviour of the lower middle class from which they sprang. Diplomatic intercourse between the representatives of the old and the new states acquired the cosy aspect of bourgeois family occasions; and it was no accident that beer, the festive drink of sturdy uprightness, became a political intoxicant. Beer evenings were the vogue. The reconciliation of the nations was achieved under the aegis of beer, just as formerly the preparation of the war had been achieved to the accompaniment of champagne. Men had become congenial. The international dominance of the bourgeoisie had only just begun.

Within this petty bourgeois diplomacy only the representatives of the sole proletarian state mastered the old diplomatic forms. A natural cunning, acquired in long struggles with the authorities, a sharp instinct for artifice and dissimulation, a spontaneous desire to deceive friend and foe, all these conferred on the representatives of the Revolution those qualities that an ancient tradition, the inherited experience of aristocratic blood and a training in courteous insincerity had conferred on the diplomats of the vanishing old world. Of all the people Friedrich now had anything to do with — and his occupation consisted in the main of having to talk to them — not a single one seemed to him capable of that kind of impassioned deliberation without which it is impossible to have an overall view of the world. All lay like soldiers in the trenches, knowing only their own section. It was war. And as each had a rank in the services, or at least a well-defined task, each took note of the uniform and insignia of the other; and if one of them were to be asked if the man he had been negotiating with every day for years were good or bad, clever or stupid, enthusiastic or half-hearted, convinced or indifferent, the questioned one would have replied: ‘Mr X, about whom you enquire, only smokes cigars, is married, negotiates with me over the concession at Tomsk and is esteemed by his superiors.’ And it really was as if the so-called ‘human’ qualities had been the characteristic features of a period of human history long past and were now only to be found on tombstones, as inscriptions for the dead. It was as if these human qualities were gradually disappearing, like goods for which there was no longer any demand, and as if they had to be replaced by others that were now much sought after. Friedrich never succeeded in obtaining any other answer to his question as to who this or that person might be than: ‘X. has left the Party, B. is editor of the Democratic newspaper, Y. is Director General of the Z. works.’ And one obtained such answers, not so much because no one cared about anyone else, but because, in fact, an editor seemed to be nothing but an editor and a Director General only a Director General. One of the most intimate peculiarities that could be imparted about a man was that he practised this or that vocation, displayed this or that political opinion. And Friedrich, who had never known a vocation, thought: ‘I am the only one with human qualities. I am malicious, nasty, egoistic, hard-hearted and intelligent. But no longer ambitious. My ambition is extinct. For its aim was to exercise power over human beings, not over Director Generals, editors and party members or those without party. It would have been my passion to see through cunning, chastise evil, buttress justice, annihilate the vicious. I would have identified with a cause. Nothing remains for me now but to look on. For twenty years I looked on, in order to learn. For a single year I fought. I shall remain an onlooker for the rest of my life. “Was it really necessary?” said old Parthagener.’

He retained enough curiosity to engage in experiences. But it was no longer the primal curiosity, which would have wanted to know what was happening, but a sort of second-class curiosity, which sought only for confirmation of what it had already accurately surmised. Once, when Friedrich had to negotiate with the executive of an aviation company, he said to himself: ‘He will be a big broad-boned man in a new light-grey suit, with hair cut short and parted on the left, a wedding-ring on his finger, no other jewellery. On his desk stands a photograph of his wife. The telephone will ring every five minutes to intimidate me. The best quality cigars and cigarettes are shut away in the drawer, so-called “smoking material” for guests lies on the table. The functional nature of the office furnishings does not exclude a certain cool leathery comfort. On the arms of soft light-yellow armchairs, squat yellow shiny ashtrays rubbed over with metal polish. The man is conservative, a moderate monarchist. He acts the honest businessman with principles, but readily lets it be recognized that he is not stupid.’

When Friedrich entered he found his conjectures confirmed. The discussion bored him from the first moment. He could have supplied an exact report of it without having taken part. To make a change and to disconcert the executive he suddenly said: ‘Would you disconnect your telephone while we’re talking!’ The great man immediately obeyed. He pressed a button with his foot; his desk was equipped with the latest technical devices and pedals like a piano. Underneath, as if by magic, all the electrical controls came out of the floor. One saw no flex leading to the lamp or the telephone, no bell on the table, no locks on the drawers, the inkwell rested in a depression in the desk and, without the executive having to make the slightest movement, he summoned his secretary by an act of simple lightning-quick volition. Friedrich noticed how the wall suddenly opened and the secretary appeared, as if he had all along been lodged in a cleft between the bricks. ‘Would you just disconnect the circuit?’ said the executive, and the secretary disappeared in a trice and the wall was whole again. ‘We are not as electrified as that in Russia yet!’ said Friedrich, pointing to the mysterious wall. ‘That I can believe!’ answered the executive. ‘We are far ahead in Germany.’ And like a man who, out of pride at the beauty of his country, shows a foreigner the landscape and tells him the names of the mountains, valleys and rivers, the executive began to explain to Friedrich the technical secrets of his office. He said ‘our’ with the same emphasis with which the party leaders spoke of their party and the Fatherland. ‘Our installation,’ he said, ‘was completed only three months ago. All the wiring is in the floor, under the carpet. Here, under the desk, you see three buttons that light up red, green and yellow. The red is an alarm signal, the green is my secretary, and the yellow my lady secretary. If I press the wall here, the picture springs out.’ He pressed, and the portrait, which showed the head of the firm, flew out of its frame like a window pushed open by a gust of wind, and revealed a secret compartment containing banknotes and documents. ‘I need only draw this curtain,’ continued the executive, ‘and I am in the midst of my family circle.’ The curtain opened and Friedrich saw a niche with life-sized coloured pictures showing a woman and two boys in sailor-suits. In the ceiling above the pictures a small lamp burned, so that the niche appeared like an altar. He drew nearer and recognized Hilde’s portrait. It had been painted by the painter with the bushy eyebrows. He immediately resolved to find out where the Director General lived, just in case and not in order to disturb family life. ‘Your wife,’ Friedrich ventured to say, ‘is very beautiful.’ ‘We have been married ten years,’ replied the executive confidingly, ‘but we are no longer deeply in love!’ And he glanced at a shiny steel ruler as if the word ‘deeply’ were a term for a specific measure of love. He stood up again and seemed to reflect. He returned to the smooth wall, touched a yellow flower on the wallpaper, and immediately a small door sprang open and revealed the gilt back of a thick leather volume. This back also opened and now Friedrich perceived that it was not a book, but a small cupboard for glasses and liqueur bottles. ‘One can’t talk properly without a drink!’ said the executive. After one glass, he became loud and exuberant, slapped Friedrich a few times on the knee and made one of the secret drawers in the green desk fly open, revealing to Friedrich pornographic postcards and hygienic objects of an erotic nature. ‘Dear friend,’ said the executive, ‘the sexual department. Sexuality is an important factor.’ And he began to spread out his pictures.

He collected them together and became serious again. ‘Distractions are necessary,’ he said. ‘I work ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day.’ And he raised his arm high and made a few gymnastic movements reminiscent of those music-hall acrobats who give their muscles a work-out before their act, as an indication that the weights they are about to lift are really heavy.

‘The executive Herr von Derschatta,’ Friedrich wrote subsequently in his report, ‘is a good-natured man. His income is large, his family life peaceful, his industry boundless. He is incorruptible. He loves his country, for it is a branch of his firm. The conditions I set out below do not seem to me to be the last word. It would be easier to deal with him if one intimidated him. He is servile by preference.’

Friedrich wrote such reports with great care, although he knew that they had a long and devious route ahead of them and that they availed little. Even as he folded them up and put them in an envelope, he saw the many stages of the journey they had to make and the faces of the men who would be dealing with them. He knew personally some of the members of the new bureaucracy which had spread over the entire country like flocks of crows, left behind by war and revolution. He recalled their subordinate faces, on which the inflexibility of a rigid outlook conferred the traits of a cruel piety. A small envy determined their brave words and their hesitant deeds, a minute and narrow envy, the brother of an early disillusioned ambition. Friedrich recalled how all of them — photographers and minor authors, shady lawyers and small accountants, book-keepers and nervous tradesmen — had dashed for the empty office-stools about which the soldiers of the Revolution did not concern themselves. The soldiers returned to their fields, which could not yet be tilled, to the machines which were still at a halt. The others, who had written and copied manifestoes, ordinances, plans, textbooks and pamphlets during the civil war, kept the pens in their hands, the pens, the thin steel instruments, the strongest tools of power. But it so happened that the men who were at liberty to demonstrate their talents and strength possessed no talents, and only sufficient strength to shove their opposite number away from the desk with their elbows and to reappear at the desk if the other had succeeded in dislodging them. He recalled the triumph afforded him during the war by the awareness of not being a cipher like the others, and not having to disobey sealed orders that were issued somewhere behind thick oppressive walls by anonymous tools of an unknown authority. He had succeeded in cheating the register that had waited, blank and white, for his names and dates, in evading the pointed pens coloured with poisonous green ink which a hundred thousand clerks had aimed at him like lances. He could still see an official at the police station, a mixture of bull and farmhand, to whom he had handed the false registration form with a childish rage. ‘Was it really necessary?’ Parthagener had asked.

Now Friedrich himself wrote reports for registers. And all the acrobatics with which he had assumed and discarded names, disguised and simulated existences, had only led him to become himself a tool, an object of the offices and bureaux. Would the paperwork never cease? What kind of decree was it that conferred on the most fragile and delicate of materials — paper, pencil and pen — power over blood and iron, brains and brawn, fire and water, hunger and epidemic? Only a moment ago the thousand chancelleries had been burnt down. He himself had set fire to them. He himself had seen their crumbling ashes. And already they were writing again in a hundred thousand chancelleries, and already there were new small books with green and red lines, and already every man had a code-number in an office as small children have a guardian angel in heaven. ‘I will not!’ cried Friedrich. ‘I will not!’ he thought, while he himself sat in an office and dictated to a girl in a blue sailor’s costume. How nimbly the pen ran with her hand! It was a Koh-i-noor, shiny yellow with a long black tip. Then the girl went into the big general office and the machine began to clatter. And the report found itself in the courier’s briefcase. He entered a secretariat. There sat Dr M., a small plump man with a face which seemed to consist of nothing but protuberances, and tiny malevolent eyes under a brow full of meaningless furrows, the consequences of a mood of the skin and not of careful thought. He hated Friedrich. He wanted to be abroad writing reports himself. Just as the front-rank party chiefs did not desire to go abroad, but endeavoured to remain in Moscow at any price, so the mediocre subordinates desired nothing more ardently than a sojourn in a bourgeois foreign country where they could live out their bourgeois tendencies. They wanted to drink good beer, to sit at a well-laid table. Was that not what one meant by the cause of the proletariat?

But what was the cause of the proletariat? These deputies, who let themselves be imprisoned and were set free again, these anonymous proletarians who were forgotten in the penitentiaries, the shot and the hanged, what use were they? How did it come about that the very ones who were attempting to construct a new world behaved according to the oldest superstition, the oldest, most absurd superstition of the profit and sanctity of sacrifice? Was it not the Fatherland that demanded sacrifice? Was it not religion that demanded sacrifice? Alas, the Revolution too demanded it! And it drove men to the altars, and everyone who submitted himself to sacrifice died in the conviction that he died for something great. And meanwhile it was the living who came off best! The world had grown old, blood was a familiar sight, death a trivial matter. All died to no purpose and were forgotten a year later. Only romanticism, like paper, was immortal.

‘I serve without belief,’ Friedrich told himself. ‘Twenty years ago it would have been called villainy. I draw my salary without convictions. I despise the men with whom I associate, I do not believe in the success of this Revolution. Between the lines of the brazen materialistic statutes that govern at least the civilized part of the world, on the other hand, there are still unknown, unreadable secrets.’

He stood there like a captain whose ship has sunk and who, contrary to duty and against his will, remains alive thanks to a malicious fate: preserved for life on earth, on an alien planet.

5

Friedrich fell ill.

He lay alone in his room, in fever’s soft delirium, and cosseted by solitude for the first time. Till now he had known only its cruel constancy and its obstinate muteness. Now he recognized its gentle friendship and caught the quiet melody of its voice. No friend, no loved one and no comrade. Only thoughts came, like children, simultaneously begotten, born and grown. For the first time in his life he learned to know illness, the beneficent pressure of soft hands, the wonderful deceptive feeling of being able to get up but unwilling to rise, the capacity to lie and float suspended at the same time, the strength that comes from loneliness like grace from misfortune, and the mute colloquy with the wide grey sky that filled the window of his high-up room, the only guest from the outside world. ‘When others are ill,’ he thought, ‘a friend comes, asks if he may smoke a cigarette, gives the patient his hand, which it then occurs to him to wash — on hygienic grounds. The sweetheart deploys her maternal instinct, proves to herself that she can love, makes a small flirtatious sacrifice, overcomes her reluctance to take hold of ugly objects with a delicate hand. The comrades come with optimistic bustle, bringing the tenor of events to the bedside in forced witty disguise, laugh too loudly and smile indulgently and obtain an assurance of their own health, just as the charitable involuntarily feel in their own pockets to check their spare change at the sight of a beggar. Only I am alone. Berzejev has stayed in Russia. He has a fatherland. I have none. It is possible that in a hundred or two hundred years time no human being in the world will have a place they can call home or asylum. The earth will look the same everywhere, like a sea, and just as a sailor is at home wherever there is the sound of water, so everyone will be at home wherever grass grows, or rock or sand. I was born too late or too early. I am one of the experiments that Nature makes here and there before she decides to bring forth a new species. When my fever wanes I shall get up and go away. I shall literally fulfil my fate to be a stranger. I shall prolong the mild abandonment of the fever a little, and wandering will transform my solitude into good fortune, as the illness has almost done.’

His fever waned. He got up. Because he had known no childhood and no mother, and because he had grown up without hearing the names of diseases and discussions as to their causes, he was not even curious to know what had been wrong with him. But he had to specify a disease to obtain his leave. He allowed himself to be told what people called the condition he had suffered from. He took six months’ leave. ‘I am now committing what is known as a shabby trick,’ he told himself. ‘According to the moral attitudes of this stupid world, it is bad enough to work for a cause of which one is not as convinced as the majority of stewards of that cause. But it’s even worse to break off from this sort of work and take money for it. Both bourgeois society and its revolutionary opponents have the same appropriate term for a character such as myself. They call such behaviour cynical. Cynicism is never permitted to the individual. Only countries, parties and guardians of the future may make use of it. For the individual there is nothing left but to show his true colours. I am a cynic.’

He therefore supplied himself with money and — as so many times in his life — with a passport in a false name. The Revolution had become legitimized by diplomatic subterfuge. A false passport no longer gave Friedrich any pleasure. Even a reactionary police force acknowledged the pseudonym of a revolutionary like the incognito of a Balkan prince. Only the newspapers, which were paid by fearful industrialists, sometimes thought they were giving the government of their country a piece of information when they reported that this or that dangerous emissary of the revolution had arrived under a false name. In reality, it was the government who strove to conceal the dangerous man from the newspapers. The times were past when Friedrich had conceived himself as waging a personal battle against the world order and its defenders by means of hazardous stratagems and superfluous dissembling. Now he possessed an unwritten but internationally recognized right to illegality.

And he travelled through the great cities of the civilized world. He saw the museums, in which the treasures of the past were hoarded in depositories like furniture for which one cannot find a use. He saw the theatres, on whose stages a slice of life was picked out, divided into acts, and portrayed by persons in pink make-up for an entrance fee. He read the newspapers in which reports were spread over current events like seductive veils over uninteresting objects. He sat in the cafés and the restaurants, in which people were collected like goods in a shop-window. He frequented the poor taverns where that part of society termed the ‘people’ diverted itself and enjoyed the vigorous robust glitter which is associated with the pleasures of poverty. As if he had never belonged to them, he visited like a stranger the halls in which they had gathered to hear about politics and to feel that they were part of the world’s bustle. And, as if he himself had never addressed them, he marvelled at their naïve enthusiasm, which greeted the hollow sound of a phrase as the devotion of the pious greeted the dull clang of a cheap bell. As if there had been no Revolution and no war! Nothing! Obliterated! Young men with wide floating trousers, with padded shoulders and flirtatious soft hips, a whole generation of sexless aviators permeated every layer of society. Football strengthened the muscles of the young workers in the same measure as those of the young bankers’ sons and gave the faces of both the same traits of presence of mind and absence of thought. The proletarians trained for revolution, the bourgeois for enjoyment. Flags waved, men marched, and just as particular vaudeville acts were repeated in every large town, so in every large town an Unknown Soldier lay buried. Even in the smaller places Friedrich encountered monuments to the fallen, as he did tap-dancing Negroes.

Now his eyes saw that ‘life’ whose distant, mysterious and wonder-revealing reflection had been shed over the wishes of his early years. It was exactly as if he had taken the play of the dark-red light, cast by an advertising sign on the window-panes opposite, for the reflection of a great and sinister conflagration. Now he saw the sources of his fine illusions. And he derided himself with the satisfaction a clever man experiences when he uncovers errors. He went around and uncovered one source after another, and he was triumphant because he won the day against himself.

In time all the sources were exposed, quicker than he had expected. Thus he learned to know forlornness in strange cities, the aimless wandering through the early twilight of evenings, when the silvery lanterns light up and afflict the body of the abandoned with the pain of a thousand sudden needle pricks. He walked through rain-soaked streets, over the gleaming asphalt of wide squares like stony lakes, coat-collar turned up, fastened from outside, and before him only his gaze to steer him through a foreign land. He rose early, walked in the bright morning full of hurrying people. Women he did not look at illuminated him with their beauty, children laughed from gardens, a forgiving clemency emanated from slow old men who seemed doubly venerable and doubly slow among the hurrying throng. Finally, there were days that revealed all the simple and indestructible beauty, days on which his wish to be able to begin life anew was almost exceeded by the solace that he could begin again without effort.

When the spring came, he found himself in Paris. Every night he walked through smooth and silent streets, encountered the fully-laden waggons on their way to the market halls, the even trot of the heavy shaggy horses, the pious rural tinkling of their bells, the shiny green of the neatly stacked bundles of cauliflowers and the smooth whiteness of their faces among the broad drooping leaves, the artificial pale red of the thin-tailed carrots, the bloody, moist and heavy glisten of the massive butchered cattle. Every night he visited a cellar where people danced, sailors, street-girls, whites and coloured men from the colonies. The accordion poured gay march tunes into the bright room, it was the instrument of exuberant melancholy. He liked it because it reminded him of his revolutionary comrades, because it was the music of abandonment and carefreeness, because it called to mind both peaceful evenings in eastern villages and the brooding heat of African deserts, because it contained both the song of the frost and the eternal stillness of summer. From every wall wide mirrors reflected the lavish rows of lamps on to the ceiling, made twenty rooms out of one, multiplied the dancing-girls a hundredfold. He no longer noticed the stairs and the door that led outside to the nocturnal streets. The mirrored walls sealed off the room more finally than stone and marble and transformed the cellar into a single endless subterranean paradise. He sat at a table and drank Schnapps. Once, in a moment when it seemed to him that he need have no fear of revealing himself because it was the last night of the world and there would be no morrow, he asked for a piece of paper and wrote, without any form of address:

‘I have not thought of you for many years. For several days I have been unable to get you out of my mind. I know that you no longer think of me. You lead a life which, today as always, is as remote from mine as one planet from another. However, this gives you my address. To be candid, I must confess that it is in no way an irresistible compulsion that induces me to write to you. Perhaps it is only an irresistible hope. …’

He went into the street. Dawn began to break, today as ever; the world had not perished. A blue light lay over the houses, someone opened a window. A car engine growled obstinately and rebelliously. In the light of the waking day Friedrich put the letter into the post-box.

6

These were no longer momentous times. The post functioned normally. The letter reached Hilde after an interval of three days. Then, one evening, when Friedrich returned to his hotel, someone was waiting for him.

He sat for a long time in his overcoat, damp and steaming from the rain, hat in hand and silent. She told him about her husband and children, of her bitter years, of her old father. She had, incidentally, brought him with her. He intended to visit a spa. He was there to reassure her jealous husband. They were now doing well. Her husband had made good use of his mediocrity. The others, the speculators with the inborn instinct for business, had been overwhelmed by the storms they had conjured up, like warriors fallen in adventures they had themselves provoked. Herr von Derschatta, however, was one of those mediocre bureaucrats of the business world who gain much though they risk nothing. She spoke in the jargon which is the mother tongue of Director Generals, of the ‘position’ that permitted certain things but not yet, or no longer, permitted others. A few strangers entered the room where they were sitting. She ceased her account. But the silence that ensued was capable of expressing all the admissions and completing all the half-admissions that she had minimized and half suppressed earlier. This silence disconcerted her the more in the presence of the other people. As if they were both as young as they had once been in the café, the fortuitousness of the external situation left them at a loss. Outside it was raining. Here strangers were sitting. ‘If she comes to my room now,’ he thought, ‘it is decided. She is expecting it.’ He said nothing.

‘Perhaps we should go up to your room?’ After the long silence it seemed as if she had prepared herself for this question.

They walked up the stairs; the presence of a stranger in the lift, a witness of their confusion, would have embarrassed them. They walked in silence, separated by a great distance, as if they were going upstairs to settle an old score. She sat down without removing her coat. Her small hat-brim shaded her eyes. Her coat was fastened up to her chin and her gaze held something valiant, ready for battle. She still felt the resolve with which she had got into the train. Friedrich walked over to the window, a movement made by every other man embarrassed by the presence of a woman in his room. ‘Why are you silent?’ she said suddenly. Anxiety trembled in her question. He heard the fear and, at the same time, the first Du that had passed between them. It was like the first lightning in spring. He turned round, thought, ‘Now she is going to cry’, and saw two moist eyes that gazed straight at him, fearless because armed with tears.

He wanted to say: ‘Why did you come here? He corrected himself. He considered which would be less hurtful, ‘why’ or ‘what for’, and finally settled for a harmless ‘how’ in conjunction with a Du. So he said: ‘How did you get here?’

With the rapid presence of mind that women achieve when they embark on a rash adventure, she had brought her father to assuage the vigilance of the Director General. This novelettish inventiveness alarmed him. So as not to be silent any longer, he said: ‘Then you’re here with your father?’

‘Say what you’re thinking,’ she began. ‘Say that you never expected me, that it was only a mood, that letter. You had probably been drinking when you wrote it.’

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘it was a sort of deep serious mood. I did not expect you. What I say now is in sorrow, not reproach: you should have come ten years ago. Too much has happened in between.’ ‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘It’s not possible straight off. I would not know where to begin. Neither would I know what was important. It occurs to me that the facts are less important than the things one can’t recount. For instance, what is more serious than any battle I have taken part in is the despair I go around in, or a word someone lets fall here and there that sometimes reveals human beings to me and sometimes humanity as a whole. But it will probably suffice to tell you the name under which I have lived for the past ten years.’ And he told her his pseudonym, of which he had been so proud.

As if this name, which she had heard and read without realizing whom it concealed, were conclusive evidence of her blindness and guilt, she began to cry. ‘Now I ought to go and kiss her,’ thought Friedrich. He noticed how, in the midst of her despair, she took off her hat and smoothed her hair, which she now wore cut short like everyone else, and he approached, glad that he had something to do, and took the hat from her hand.

She shook her head, rose, asked with her eyes for the hat, and said quietly: ‘I must go.’

‘I shall let her go,’ he thought.

But now, when she lifted both arms to put on her hat, she seemed to him in despair, and therefore doubly beautiful, as he had never seen her before. She was young, she had let the years pass by like zephyrs, she had borne children and was young. He saw her again in the softly rolling carriage and in the shop, trying on gloves, and in the café, beside him in the corner, and in the street in the rain. In this one movement, when she raised her arms, lay all her beauty. Her movement simultaneously evoked every aspect of beauty, supplication, disrobing, denial and submission. She lowered her arms. The right hand began to stretch a glove over the left with scrupulous care.

‘Stay!’ he said suddenly. And he added to this: ‘Don’t go!’, more gently, tenderly, and a little sharply, as he noticed in self-reproach a moment later.

‘All it needs is for me to turn the key, and it’s settled.’ He saw how Hilde glanced at the door and slowly and scrupulously stripped off her glove again. Now it was an unclothed hand, not just a naked one. It seemed as if he were seeing her for the first time. He took a single rapid step to the door and locked it.

7

Old Herr von Maerker was due to travel on for his cure the next day. Friedrich saw him that evening. The festive glow of the many lamps in the restaurants made his white-haired old age more venerable, his daughter’s beauty more radiant. Herr von Maerker looked older than he was, and more important. He resembled old portraits, faces that time has moulded more than nature or art, endowed with the lustre of a melancholy solemnity by the irrevocability of the vanished epochs which they mirror. Herr von Maerker had never been astute. Now, as occasionally happens, his age deputized for wisdom. And, because he was one of those men who have outlived their epoch, he evoked in Friedrich the courteous respect one owes to an old forgotten monument. He did not seem to suspect that Hilde’s encounter with Friedrich was other than pure coincidence. But even had he suspected, his respect for his daughter’s life and privacy was too great for him to seek to discern relationships that were not voluntarily disclosed to him. Like the men of his generation, he still took it for granted that wives and daughters had a natural instinct for the decorous and the unseemly, for honour and appearance, for reputation and worth. Herr von Maerker still belonged to the last generation of well-mannered Middle Europeans who cannot remain seated when a woman is standing in front of them, who, without venturing a reproof, are continually amazed by the manners of the young, who still speak gracefully while they are eating, and who can still say something sensible without being intelligent themselves, who are chivalrous and harmless and distribute compliments like little declarations of love committing them to nothing. He was aware of his daughter’s unhappy marriage, but it did not occur to him to reproach himself for having compelled the Director General to marry Hilde. He had not known his daughter for many a year. Now age made him clearsighted. But he kept silent, not only because he would have been embarrassed to ask, but because he would have been even more embarrassed to let it be noticed that he possessed the capacity to guess.

‘I remember you very well,’ he said to Friedrich. ‘You visited us once.’ Friedrich thought of the candid journalist who had so obstinately assured him that he did not recognize him. ‘Much has happened since then. And yet it seems to me that we knew it all beforehand. Year by year I was able to see with my own eyes how the country was disintegrating, how people were becoming indifferent. But malicious too, yes, malicious,’ he added. He said this with the hindsight of one beyond the tomb.

‘We made jokes, we all laughed at them,’ he continued. ‘I have to reproach myself for a few. Believe me, jokes alone are enough to destroy an ancient country. All races have mocked. And yet in my time, when the man was more important than his nationality, the possibility existed of making a homeland for all out of the old monarchy. It could have been the prototype in miniature of a great future world, and at the same time the last reminder of a great European era in which North and South had been united. It is all over,’ concluded Herr von Maerker, with a slight movement of the hand with which he seemed to disperse the last remnants of his recollections.

Even his sadness was accompanied by serenity. His sombre obituary on his fatherland did not prevent him from enjoying to the full, and with a mild deliberation, his black coffee and thin cigarette and it seemed as if he enjoyed life the more because it still continued beyond his own time, and as if he enjoyed each day, each evening, each meal that heaven granted him with the pleasure one derives from unexpected and unearned holidays. The destruction of the monarchy had put an end only to the active period of his life, he had only ceased to exist as a contemporary, but he continued to live on as the passive observer of a new era which, though it did not please him at all, did not bother him in the slightest because it did not in any way concern him.

He took leave of Friedrich, Hilde accompanied him. They decided to meet again in an hour.

During this hour Friedrich walked up and down in front of the hotel, just as he would have done ten years before. ‘Everything’s alive again!’ he thought. ‘Nothing has happened between the day I first saw her in the carriage and today. I am young and happy. Shall I yet believe in the miracle of love? It is obviously a miracle when what has happened is obliterated.’

And then he said to Hilde: ‘Once, during my escape from Siberia, I thought of taking you with me to a remote and peaceful country. There are still peaceful foreign countries. Let us be on our way.’

‘We do not need them in order to be happy.’

They walked through broad unlighted streets, across animated squares, avoided dangers unthinkingly, only by means of the waxing instinct to remain alive and to live. They would have succeeded in saving themselves from a catastrophe, among a thousand who perished they would have been the only survivors.

He was spared none of the follies with which masculine infatuation is so well endowed. Jealousy possessed him, not so much against particular men but a jealousy for the whole of the long period that Hilde had passed without him. And he even finally asked that most stupid and masculine of all the questions contained in the lexicon of love: ‘Why didn’t you wait for me?’ And he received the inevitable reply, which any other woman would have given, and which is far from a logical answer but rather a continuation of this question: ‘I have never loved anyone but you!’

And so love began to lead him from an abnormal to a normal existence, and he got to know its mortal and yet eternal delights and, for the first time in his life, the happiness that consists in giving up great goals in favour of small ones and of overestimating the attainable so extravagantly that there is nothing more to seek. They travelled through white cities, stood in great harbours, saw ships sail for foreign shores, met trains that sped into the unknown, and could never catch sight of a ship or a train without envisaging themselves travelling off into the distance, the future, the void. They anxiously counted the days they could still remain together, and the fewer they became the richer and more full of improbable happenings the remainder seemed to be. If the first week had been an indivisible unit of time, the second already split into days, the third into hours, and in the fourth, in which they began to savour every moment as an entire rich day, they regretted having allowed the first to pass so prodigally.

‘I shall follow you everywhere,’ said Hilde, ‘even to Siberia!’

‘Why should I go there? I no longer intend to place myself in dangerous situations.’

‘What else do you want to do then?’

‘Nothing at all.’

Hilde fell into a deep and disappointed silence. It was the first time that they had suddenly arrived at a point where they ceased to understand each other. These moments recurred more and more often, only they forgot them over again. Both delayed explanations for more favourable opportunities. But such opportunities generally failed to arrive and the silent hours became increasingly common. There were tendernesses that Friedrich did not reciprocate. Words fell from the lips of each without an echo, like stones into a bottomless abyss.

Once she said, perhaps to propitiate him: ‘I admire you, for all that.’ And he could not restrain himself from replying: ‘Whom haven’t you admired before now? A painter, a gifted author, the war, the wounded. Now you’re admiring a revolutionary.’

‘One gets more clever,’ she replied.

‘One gets more stupid,’ he said.

And there began a rapid to-and-fro of empty meaningless words, a battle with empty nutshells.

‘She has to have someone to admire,’ thought Friedrich. ‘At the moment, I am her hero. Too late, too late. She turns to me at a moment when I am beginning to disown myself. I am no longer my old self, I merely continue to play the part — out of chivalry.’

However, it was settled between them that Hilde would leave her husband and children.

‘Don’t forget,’ she said as she got on the train, ‘that I shall follow you everywhere. …’ ‘Even to Siberia,’ she added as the train began to gather speed.

He could no longer answer.

She was due to join him a week later.

8

Actually, the story of our contemporary, Friedrich Kargan, might have come to a satisfactory ending here, if by that one understands the final homecoming to a loved woman and the prospect of a kind of domestic happiness that offers itself in the last pages of a book. But Friedrich’s peculiar destiny, or the inconstancy of his nature with which we have become acquainted in the present account, resisted so gentle an exit from a stormy existence. Some weeks ago we were startled by the news that he and some members of the so-called ‘opposition’ who, as is generally known, had declared an open resistance to the ruling régime in Russia, had gone to Siberia for a long spell. What occasioned him to suffer once again for a cause of which he was clearly no longer convinced? On the basis of what little we can deduce from the most recent events in his life, we can only surmise and conjecture as follows.

After he had left Hilde, he found a communication from his friend Berzejev. ‘I am not sorry,’ wrote the latter, ‘that I did not follow you abroad, but I regret that I shall presumably never see you again. Call it the sentimentality of a clearly anarchistically disposed man, which no longer embarrasses me now that I have been publicly stripped of the rank of a revolutionary. To console you, let me say that I go into exile compulsorily and yet willingly. If Savelli only suspected how he is actually satisfying my secret yearning, he would probably assign me to a perpetual couriership between Moscow and Berlin as a punishment; I mean to the post of an upholder of culture, a herald of the electrification of the proletariat, its transformation into an efficient middle class. For men like us, Siberia is the only possible abode.’

The same kind of yearning for the edge of the world could equally well have been expressed by Friedrich. Whether one changes the direction of one’s life or not does not seem to depend on a voluntary decision. The bliss of having once suffered for a great ideal and for humanity governs our decisions, even after doubt has long made us clearsighted, knowledgeable and without hope. One has gone through the fire and remains marked for the rest of one’s life. Perhaps, too, the woman entered Friedrich’s life too late. Perhaps his old friend meant more to him than she did.

The old friend — and the same bitterness which nurtured this friendship today, as formerly the same idealism had done. Did they not both walk about with the proud grief of silent prophets, did they not both record in their invisible writing the symptoms of an inhuman and technically accomplished future, whose emblems are the aeroplane and the football and not the hammer and sickle? ‘Compulsorily and yet willingly’ — as Berzejev wrote — others too made their way to Siberia.

9

That is possibly why Friedrich obeyed the order to come to Moscow. He stood in Savelli’s office. It was situated in the often described and, one may say, most feared building in Moscow. A light bare room. The customary portraits of Marx and Lenin were absent from the light-yellow walls. There were three wide comfortable leather chairs, two in front of the large desk and one behind it. Savelli occupied the latter, back to the window, face turned to the door. On the shining plate-glass over the desk there lay nothing but a single blank yellow octavo sheet. The glass reflected the dim sky admitted by the window. It was somewhat surprising, in this cold room which seemed still to be waiting for its furnishings, in which however Savelli had lived for over two years, to tread on a thick soft red carpet that was intended to absorb not only the sound of footsteps but all sound of any kind. Savelli still looked as he did on the morning when he had crossed the frontier. As R. had said of him, he had changed as little as a principle.

‘Sit down,’ said Savelli to Friedrich.

‘Will it take that long?’

‘I can’t very well sit while you stand.’

‘I don’t wish to make it comfortable for either of us.’ Savelli rose.

‘If you wish,’ began Savelli, ‘you can have company. R. is leaving tomorrow. He is going to Kemi, sixty-five kilometres from Solovetsk. These are, as you know, pleasant islands, 65 degrees north latitude, 36 degrees of longitude east of Greenwich. Their shores are rocky, with romantic ravines. There are eight thousand, five hundred romantics there already. And please, don’t despise the monastery, which dates from the fifteenth century. It even has gilded domes. We’ve only removed the crosses. That should make R. sad.’

‘R. is no friend of mine,’ replied Friedrich. ‘You’re mistaken, Savelli. At a very important period, R. was your friend and not mine. You know well enough that I want to be with Berzejev.’

‘I’m at a loss where friendships are concerned. R. had his duty to do, like you and me, no more. He does not choose to go on with it — any more than you.’

‘There are such things as rewards.’

‘Not in our cause. We are not our own historians. I have never received a reward. I am only a tool.’

‘You told me that once before.’

‘Yes, some twenty years ago. I have a good memory. There was a good friend of yours present then. Would you like to see him?’

Savelli went to the door and said something softly to the guard. The door stayed half-open. A few minutes later Kapturak appeared in its frame. As if he had come for just this purpose, he began:

‘Parthagener is dead at last. And I’m alive, as you can see.’

He began to move about the room, as if he had to prove it. Cap on his head, hands behind his back.

‘You see, it’s not true that Comrade Savelli is ungrateful. Do you remember? I could have got fifty thousand roubles for him once.’

‘And what do you earn here?’

‘All kind of experiences, experiences. The expenses on the train don’t bring in much. Sometimes I accompany people I know well in the sleeping-car. Do you remember how we used to foot it? I couldn’t do it any more nowadays. Look!’ Kapturak removed his cap and showed his thick snow-white hair, as white as Parthagener’s beard used to be.

He accompanied Friedrich to P. Friedrich no longer travelled between decks, nor in a barred railway carriage. Kapturak was sent with him, not out of mistrust but as a guide, and because Savelli possessed a certain relish for underlining the events that depended on his ukase.

10

While these lines are being written, Friedrich is living in P., together with Berzejev. Just as in Kolymsk.

Only P. is a larger town. It must comprise some five hundred inhabitants. And moreover, as a consolation, a man called Baranowicz lives there, a Pole, who has remained in Siberia since his youth of his own free will, without any curiosity about world events, which only reach the walls of his lonely house like a distant echo. He lives as a contented eccentric with his two large dogs, Jegor and Barin, and for several years has given shelter to the beautiful silent Alja, the wife of my friend Franz Tunda, who abandoned her when he left for the West. Foresters and bear-hunters drop in on Baranowicz. Once a year the Jew Gorin comes with new technical devices. On the basis of information received, Friedrich and Berzejev have made friends with Baranowicz. A man one can trust.

And so they lead the old new life as once before. The frost sings in the winter nights. Its melody may remind the prisoners of the secret humming voices of the telegraph wires, the technical harps of civilized countries. The twilights are long, slow and oppressive, and obscure as much as half of the stunted days. What might the friends find to talk about? They no longer have the consolation of being exiled for the cause of the people, to be sure. Let us hope then that they are contemplating escape.

For in our view it is the mark of a disappointed man to suppress his nostalgia for the old solitude and bravely to endure the present in the clamorous void. To determined onlookers like Friedrich, without any hope, the old solitude offers every pleasure: the putrescent smell of water and fish in the winding alleys of old harbour towns, the paradisiacal glitter of lights and mirrors in the cellars where made-up girls and blue sailors dance, the melancholy ecstasy of the accordion, the profane organ of popular desire, the fine and foolish bustle of the wide streets and squares, the rivers and lakes of asphalt, the illuminated green and red signals in the railway stations, those glassed-in halls of yearning. And finally the hard and proud melancholy of a solitary who wanders on the fringes of pleasures, follies and sorrows. …