The Silent Prophet (16 page)

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 tide '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 . . . .'