The Silent Prophet (22 page)

'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 ....