The Silent Prophet (15 page)

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

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

'I was with L. yesterday, for the third time now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

16

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

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

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

Book Three

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.