The Silent Prophet (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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

The train started to move off again slowly.

13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it rained.

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

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

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

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

Farewell!

Your Friedrich'

At five he went to meet Tomkin.

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

'Really!' said Friedrich.

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

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

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

He was a fine fellow who had worked his way up through diligence and a creditable lack of original ideas.

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

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

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

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

It was still raining.

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

'How quickly Kapturak manages
it!'
thought Friedrich.