The Silent Prophet (3 page)

This encounter with a beautiful woman was like the first encounter with an enemy. Friedrich assessed his position. He weighed up his forces. He summed them up and pondered whether he dared to go into battle. He had just taken a barricade. He had, through a laughable examination, become fit for society. He could become anything: a defender of mankind, but also its oppressor; a general and a minister; a cardinal, a politician, a people's tribune. Nothing—apart from his clothes—hindered him from advancing far beyond the position the young woman might occupy; from becoming idolized by her and her kind; and from rejecting her. Naturally, rejecting her.

What a long way for one who was poor and alone! For one without even a name or papers! Everyone else was rooted in a home. Everyone else was fixed as fast as bricks in a wall. They had the precious certainty that their own downfall would also mean the end of the others. The streets were quiet and filled with peaceful sunshine. Closed windows. Lowered blinds. Happiness and love dwelled unalloyed behind the green and yellow curtains. Sons honoured their fathers, mothers understood their children, women embraced their husbands, brothers hugged each other.

He could not divorce himself from this quiet, prosperous, fortunate district in which he happened to be. He made detours as if, by some miracle, he might suddenly find himself in front of his house without having to traverse the noisy dirty streets which led to his lodging. The chimney-stacks of the factories emerged straight behind the roofs. The people had slept in tenements, could not keep their balance and seemed as if drunk. The haste of poverty is frightened and soundless and yet begets an indistinct uproar.

He lodged with a tailor, in a gloomy little room. The window had tarnished panes and opened on the hall. It prevented light from entering and the neighbours from looking in. Sewing machines clattered in the landlord's bedroom. The ironing-board lay across the bed, the dressmaker's dummy was propped against the door, customers were measured in the kitchen and the wife, stuck by the stove with flushed face, scolded the four children at their play.

'If I go to the restaurant first,' reflected Friedrich, 'the family will have eaten by the time I get back. There'll be only the washing-up left to do.'

He entered a small restaurant. A man sat down at his table. His ears were strikingly large and withered as if made of yellow paper, his head batlike.

'I think you must be my neighbour,' said the man. 'Don't you live across the road at Number 36?'

'Yes.' 'I've seen you around for some weeks. Do you always eat here?'

'Sometimes.'

'I suppose you're a student.'

'Not yet! I have to get enrolled first.'

'What kind, may I ask?'

'Don't know yet!'

'I'm an address-writer,' said the man. 'My name is Grünhut. I was a student once too. But I had bad luck.' It was as if he really meant: You won't escape that fate either.'

'Do you manage all right?' asked Friedrich.

'As an address-writer! Three heller an envelope. A hundred a day, sometimes a hundred and twenty. I can get work for you too. Willingly! I'd be glad to do so. Is your handwriting good? Come tomorrow!'

They went to a linen warehouse. The book-keeper handed them a list and a hundred and fifty green envelopes.

'Where are you eating tonight?' asked Grünhut. 'Come with me.'

They ate in a cellar. They were given soup made of sausage scraps. A long table. Hurrying rattling spoons. Metal tableware. Noises of lips smacking, spoons scraping, throats gurgling. 'Good soup!' said Grünhut. 'I'll show you about the coffee, we have that across the road, at Grüner's. Soon you won't have to bother any more, you'll be eating in the college refectory. I used to feed there once.'

'I could find myself in the same situation,' said Friedrich.

'What, really? What situation? My situation, of course! Do you really think so? Yes, it's a good thing that I've shown you all these places. I had to discover them myself.'

'Thank you.'

'Oh, not at all! Not at all! When I came out of prison, I was all alone. Wife divorced! Brother a stranger. Didn't know me anymore. Apart from Frau Tarka, I didn't know a soul. Her brother was in clink with me. So he recommended me. Connections are what count in our circles too. Do you know Frau Tarka? She's the midwife, just over your tailor's. My room's above yours. I checked. You wouldn't believe how many come to Frau Tarka. Yesterday, for example, Dr D.'s daughter. Six months ago it was the wife of a proper Excellency. And the young men! Sons of public prosecutors and generals! Bring their careless little girls. And all I did was to undo the blouse of the pupil I was teaching geography and history in the sixth form, at the high school in the Floriangasse, a private school. Good children from good homes. A working man's daughter wouldn't have said anything. But the well-off! I know a lawyer who raped his ward. A lieutenant who sleeps with his batman. I could write them each a little anonymous letter if I were a scoundrel. But I'm not, in spite of everything. Where do you stand politically? Left, of course! What? I've no opinions. But I think a revolution would do us good. A small short revolution. Three days, for instance.'

A peculiar relationship developed between Friedrich and myself at that time. I might call it intimacy without friendship or comradeship without affection. And even the fellow-feeling which later linked us was not present at the outset. It arose from the attention we began to pay each other one day and from the mutual mistrust we detected in each other. Finally we began to respect each other. Trust grew slowly, was fostered by the glances we exchanged, almost without realizing it, in the company of others and less by the words that passed than by the silences in which we often sat and strolled together. Had our lives not taken such differing courses, Friedrich would probably have become my friend, as did Franz Tunda.

It was a long time before Friedrich decided to look up Savelli, who was still living in Vienna at that time. He was afraid. He felt that, for the time being, he still had the choice between what he termed 'revolutionary asceticism' and the 'world', the vague romantic notion of pleasures, struggles, triumphs. Already he hated the governance of this world, but he still believed in it.

The finely soaring ramp of the University did not yet seem to him—as it did to me—the fortress wall of the national students' association, from which every few weeks Jews or Czechs were flung down, but as a kind of ascent to 'Knowledge and Power'. He had the respect of the self-taught for books, which is even greater than that contempt for books which distinguishes the wise. When he leafed through a catalogue, stood in front of the bookshop windows, sat in the quiet mildly dusty rooms of the library, regarded the dark-green backs of innumerable books on the tall wide shelves, the military ranks of green lampshades on the long tables, the deep devotion which makes every reader in the library look like a pious worshipper in a church, he was seized by the fear that he did not know the All-Important, and that one life might be too short to gain experience of it. He read and learned hastily, unsystematically, following changing inclinations, attracted by a title or a recollection of having heard of it before. He filled notebooks with observations that he took to be 'fundamental' and was almost inconsolable if a phrase, a date, a name escaped him. He listened to all lectures, necessary and unnecessary. He was always to be seen in the auditorium, always in the last row, which was also usually the highest. From there he overlooked the bent heads of the audience, the open white notebooks, the tiny blurred shorthand. The professor was so far away that to a certain extent he had lost his private humanity, was no more than a purveyor of knowledge. But Friedrich remained solitary, surrounded by candid faces in which nothing was evident but youth. One could, at a pinch, distinguish the races. Social differences were recognizable only by secondary characteristics. The well-to-do had manicured fingernails, tiepins, well-cut suits. All around a stone-deaf stolid wellbeing.

Only in the eyes of some Jewish students there shone a shrewd, a crafty or even a foolish melancholy. But it was the melancholy of blood and race, handed down to the individual and acquired by him without risk. In the same way, the others had inherited their wellbeing. Only groups distinguished themselves from each other by ribbons, colours, convictions. They prepared themselves for a barrack-room life and each already carried his rifle, his so-called 'Ideal'.

At that time we had a common acquaintance named Leopold Scheller, who happened to be the only student with whom Friedrich associated. He concealed nothing, always told the truth, naturally only the truth as he knew it, and put up with any insult that was flung at him. He did not believe it could be meant personally. If anyone offended his honour, as he saw it, by a look or a deliberate or chance shove in the Great Hall, it was not so much a matter of his honour, as that of the students' club to which he belonged. When Friedrich was bored he went to Scheller, who did not seem to be acquainted with boredom. He was always preoccupied with his philosophy of life.

He once surprised Friedrich with the information that he had got engaged. And he at once reached into his trouser-pocket, where he usually carried his pistol in a leather case. On this occasion he took out a wallet and out of the wallet a photograph. He noted Friedrich's amazement and said: 'My fiancée has taken my pistol away. She won't permit it.'

The photograph showed a pretty young woman of some eighteen years. She had black eyes and hair. 'She's certainly not a blonde then,' said Friedrich.

'She is Italian,' replied Scheller evenly, as if he had never been a Teuton.

'But,' persisted Friedrich, 'what are you doing with an Italian girl?'

'Love conquers all,' began Scheller. 'It is the greatest power on earth. Besides, I shall be making a German of her.'

'And how long have you known the lady?'

'Since the day before yesterday,' replied Scheller, beaming. 'I accosted her in the park.'

'And engaged already?'

'There's nothing else for it—either, or.'

'And your Club?'

'I'm resigning. Because she doesn't care for it. I wrote today to ask her father for her hand. He is a bank-clerk in Milan. My fiancée is with relatives here. We are getting married in two months' time. How do you like her?'

'Enormously!'

'Don't you agree? She is beautiful? She is unique?' And he laid a small piece of tissue-paper over the photograph and tucked it away again in his pistol pocket.

Although Friedrich did not consider Scheller's happiness lasting and feared disillusion for his friend, he nevertheless experienced in the proximity of this infatuation the warming reflection of a bliss not previously encountered, and he sunned himself in the other's love as if he lay in a strange meadow. Scheller was an entirely happy man. From lack of understanding he was incapable of a moment's doubt—a condition that normally accompanies love as shadow accompanies light. As the bliss he received was boundless, he radiated it again outwards. It was a bliss mightier than Scheller himself. Friedrich envied him and simultaneously relished the misery of his own solitude. He now imagined that his entire life would acquire meaning and expression when he met the woman he sought. Although he considered Scheller's method of picking up a girl in the park foolish, he did betake himself to the green spaces, which is not the colour of hope but of yearning. Moreover, everything was already autumnal and yellow. And the impatience of his searching heart waxed as the world approached winter.

He began to study with redoubled zeal. But as soon as he put down a book, it seemed to him as foolish as Scheller himself. Scholarship concealed what was really important as the rock strata concealed the earth's centre—secret, ever burning, ever invisible, not to be revealed before the end of the world. One learned about amputating legs, Gothic grammar, canon law. One could just as easily have learnt how to store furniture, manufacture wooden legs or pull teeth. And even philosophy made up its own answers and interpreted the sense of the question in relation to the answer that suited it. It was like a schoolboy who alters the problem set him to fit the false result of his mathematical labours.

Before long Friedrich began to become a less frequent attender in the lecture theatres. 'No,' he said, 'I'd rather pass the time with Grünhut. I have seen through them all. This intellectual flirtation of the elegant professors who lecture to the daughters of high society in the evenings from six to eight. A light-hearted excursion into philosophy, Renaissance art history, with lantern-slides in a darkened hall, national economy with sarcastic remarks about Marxism—no, that's not for me. And then, the so-called strict professors, who give lectures at a quarter past eight in the mornings, just after sunrise, so as to be free for the rest of the day—for their own work. The bearded senior lecturers who are on the look-out for a good marriage so that, through some connection with the Minister of Education, they may at last become established professors with salaries. And the malicious smiles of spiteful examiners, who carry off glorious victories over failed candidates. The University is an institution for the children of good middle-class homes with well-organized primary teaching, eight years of middle school, private coaching by tutors, the prospect of a judgeship, of a prosperous legal practice or a government office through marrying a second cousin—not a first cousin, because of consanguinity. And finally for the blockheads of the uniformed students' societies who fight each other, for pure Aryans, pure Zionists, pure Czechs, pure Serbs. Not for me! I'd rather write addresses with Grünhut.'

Once he discovered Savelli's name in one of the library catalogues. The book was entitled
International Capital and the Petroleum Industry.
He looked for the book and did not find it. It was out on loan. And as if this incident had been a sign from above he immediately betook himself from the library to Savelli.

In Savelli's room, on the fifth floor of a grey tenement in a proletarian district, there were three men. They had removed their jackets and hung them over the chairs they were sitting on. An electric bulb on a long flex hung from the ceiling and swung low over the rectangular table, constantly moved by the breath of the men talking but also by their repeated attempts to shift the lamp out of their field of vision whenever it hid one or the other. Sometimes, irritated by the annoying bulb but without recognizing it as the cause of his impatience, one of the three would get up, walk twice round the table, cast a searching glance at the sofa by the wall, and resume his original place. It was impossible just to sit down on the sofa. Heavy books and light newspapers, coloured pamphlets, prospectuses, dark-green library volumes, manuscripts and unused octavo sheets yellowing at the edges lay there higgledy-piggledy, and all subject to unknown laws which prevented the heavy volumes of an encyclopaedia from sliding off a thin stack of green pamphlets Savelli had relinquished the chairs to his guests and sat on a pile of eight thick books, but still so low that his chin just projected above the table-top.