by Joseph Roth
He felt only the wind, like a consolation from infinite space.
Book Two
It was evening. The water splashed softly and caressingly against the steamer floating on the Volga. The heavy regular thump of the engines could be heard between decks. The swaying lanterns cast light and shadow over the two hundred men who had lain down there, each exactly where he happened to have been standing when he set foot on the ship. At the quiet way-stations the engines fell silent and one heard the low shouts of sailors and porters and the slap of water against wood.
Most of the prisoners lay stretched out on the deck. A hundred and twenty of the two hundred between-deck passengers were in irons. They wore chains at their right wrist and right ankle. Those who were not fettered seemed almost like free men beside the chained men. Now and again there appeared a policeman, an inquisitive sailor. The prisoners took no notice either of their guards or their visitors. Although it was quite early in the evening and food was due to be handed out in half an hour, most slept, tired after the long march they had covered. The government was sending them on the slow cheap route by water, after having made them go a long distance on foot. The day after tomorrow they were to be freighted on the railroad. They were stocking up well on sleep.
Some of them already knew their way around. It was not the first time they had made this trip. These were experienced, settled down in a practical manner, and gave advice to the novices. They enjoyed a certain authority among their comrades. With the gendarmes they were linked by a kind of intimate hostility.
They were called to meals as if to an execution. They lined up behind one another, chains clanking between them. It seemed as if they were all strung on a single chain. A spoon landed with a regular splashing stroke in the cauldron, then there was the soft gurgle of a stream of soup flowing softly downwards, a damp mass fell on a hard metal plate. Heavy feet shuffled, a chain dragged clanking, and ever and again another detached himself from the line as if he had been unstrung. The lower space became filled with the vapour rising from two hundred metal plates and mouths. All ate. And, although they themselves conducted the spoon to their lips, it seemed as if they were being fed by alien arms which did not belong to their bodies. Their eyes, which were sated much sooner than their stomachs, already had the vacant look of repletion which characterizes the head of a family at table, the look that is already advancing into the domain of sleep.
'When I look at these men as they feed,' said Friedrich to Berzejev, a former lieutenant, 'I am convinced that they need nothing more than a ball and chain on the leg, a spoon in the right hand, and a tin plate in the left. The heart is so near the bowels, tongue and teeth so closely adjacent to the brain, the hands that write down thoughts can so easily slaughter a lamb and turn a spit, that I find myself as much at a loss before human beings as before a legendary dragon.'
'You talk like a poet,' replied Berzejev, smiled, and showed in his black beard two rows of gleaming teeth which seemed to confirm Friedrich's conjecture. 'I cannot find such words. But I too have seen that man is a puzzle, and above all that it is not possible to help him.'
Both felt alarmed. Were they not here because they wanted to help him? They turned away from each other.
'Good night,' said Berzejev. Outside the guard was relieved.
2
After four days they were disembarked, led into a large room and entrained. They were refreshed as they trod solid ground again, and their chains gave a livelier ring. Even beneath the turning wheels of the train they felt the earth. Through the barred windows they saw grass and fields, cows and herdsmen, birches and peasants, churches and blue smoke over chimneystacks, the entire world from which they were cut off. And yet, it was a consolation that it had not perished, that it had not even altered. As long as houses stood and cattle grazed, the world awaited the return of the prisoners. Freedom was not like a possession which each one of them had lost. It was an element like the air.
Rumours circulated through the waggons. In recollection of the tidings heard and exchanged in recent prisons, they were called 'latrine reports'. Some said that the entire transport would go straight to Vierchoiansk, which was denounced by the knowledgeable as nonsense. Adrassionov, the NGO, had told one of the old hands whom he was now transporting for the second time, that they would be taken to Tiumen, to one of the biggest prisons, the Tiuremni Zamok, or central prison for exiles. The experienced, who had already been there, began to depict the horrors of this jail. At first they shuddered at their own words and made their listeners shudder. But gradually, during their narration, the thrill they derived from their narrative exceeded its content, and the curiosity of the listeners dominated their terror. They sat there like children listening to stories of glass palaces. Panfilov and Sjemienuta, two old white-bearded Ukrainians, even described the solitary cells with a kind of nostalgia; and, so forgetful is the human heart and because the journey still seemed unending and its destination still uncertain despite the affirmations of the old hands, all of them believed for a few short hours that it was not they themselves but quite other strangers who were travelling towards the miseries of the prisons.
Friedrich and Berzejev resolved to stay together as far as possible. Berzejev had money. He knew how to bribe, swap lists and names and—while the other 'politicals' discussed the peasants, anarchy, Bakunin, Marx and the Jews—calculated whom he should give a cigarette and whom a rouble.
Although they travelled slowly, waited for hours at goods stations, the railway journey nevertheless seemed shorter than they had expected. Once again the chains rattled, once again there was a roll-call. They stood at the last station and took their leave of the attractive appurtenances of the railway, of its technical playthings, its green signals and red flags, the shrill bells of glass and the hard bells of iron, the indefatigable ticking of the telegraph and the yearning swerving gleam of the rails, of the panting breath of the locomotive and the hoarse screech it sent up to the sky, the guard's hail and the wave of the station officials, a wall and a garden fence, of the meagre refreshment room at this forlorn station and the girl who stood behind the bottles and tended a samovar. Especially this girl. Friedrich contemplated her as if she were the last European woman he would be allowed to look at and had to memorize carefully. He recalled Hilde as he might a girl he had talked to twenty years ago. At times he could no longer picture her face. It seemed to him that she had become old and grey in the interim, a grandmother.
They climbed into waggons, halted every twenty-five kilometres, changed horses. Only the driver remained the same throughout the journey. A large part of the convoy had remained behind and was indeed due to be delivered to one of the large collective prisons. Now they consisted only of a few groups. Friedrich and Berzejev, Freyburg and Lion sat in one waggon. Without everyone seeing, Friedrich pressed Berzejev's hand. They sealed a silent compact.
When any of the prisoners removed his cap, one saw the left half of his skull shaved bare, and his face took on the foolish imprint of a lunatic. Each shrank from the other, but each hid his horror under a smile. Only Berzejev had succeeded in bribing the barber. He had his whole scalp shaved bare.
The prisoners sang one song after another. The soldiers and the driver joined in. At times one man would sing alone, and then it was as if he sang with the strength of all. His voice was drowned in the many-voiced refrain, which was like an echo from heaven to earth.
The best singer was Konov, a weaver from Moscow, at whose house a secret printing-press had been discovered. He was on his way to fifteen years' imprisonment.
3
One morning they began their march. Across a desolate flat landscape deployed the trail of human beings with bundles, fetters, sticks in hands.
Of the fifty men thus making their way, in groups of eight, six and ten guarded by sharp bayonets on long rifles, only the oldest manifested fatigue. According to regulations, each was allowed to carry only fifteen poods of baggage. Some who had refused to cut down on their bel
ongings at the last station now discarded useful with unnecessary objects. The soldiers collected all of these and left them behind in the jurts which they passed, and which they would revisit on the return journey. Only Berzejev threw nothing away. His bulky pack was carried by the soldiers. He would say a good word to them, stick a cigarette in their mouths, and click his tongue at them as if they were horses.
After they had been marching in silence for a long time, Berzejev ordered: 'Sing'. They sang. But they stopped right after the first verse. A hesitant pause ensued, then the refrain was taken up by a timorous voice, and it was a long time before the others joined in. The melody did not quicken their lagging feet. Exile itself advanced towards them. The railway, horses, carriages and men, all had been left far behind. The sky arched over the flat earth like a round roof of grey lead, soldered around its edges. They were sealed down under the sky. In prison, at least, one knew that a sky still arched above the walls. But here the very freedom was an imprisonment. In the leaden sky there were no bars through which one could spy another sky of blue air. The vastness of this space was more confining than a cell.
Gradually they broke up into ever smaller groups. With tears in their eyes and their beards they bade each other farewell. Friedrich, Berzejev and Lion stayed together. On the first day they still spoke of one or other with whom they had sung together. As soon as they struck up in a threesome the songs that had flowed from everyone's throats a few days previously, they remembered those others whose voices they would never hear again. The songs had become a kind of resonant bond of amity. They had brought strangers together with the power of blood shed in common and pain suffered in common. Then the departed were gradually forgotten. Only now and again did there revive in memory a face that no longer bore a name, a tear in a black beard that no longer belonged to any face, and a word would ring out whose speaker was no longer known.
They were led far and stragglingly, they saw the unpeopled shores of the Obi. The two small settlements of Hurgut and Narym seemed to them large and lively towns. They stayed overnight in Narym. They learned to collect bugs in their fists and drown them in large buckets, also to coax the small white files of lice from the walls into paper cornets and burn them. They began to esteem the lonely scattered jails where they chanced to halt as welcoming homes. They saw distant forest fires, bartered with Chinese merchants from Chifu for Siberian fur gloves and boots of reindeer hide. They listened to the legends of the Yakuts about the Indiguirka River, and the Dogdo rivulet which carries gold along its bed.
Winter came. They became accustomed to 67 degrees Celsius below zero and to the frosted windowpanes of ice in the jurts. And they awaited the forty sunless days in the town of Vierchoiansk, the town with the twenty-three houses.
It was laid down that their fixed location should be ten versts from a town, ten versts from a river and ten versts from a high-road. Yet they managed to settle by a river, the Kolyma River. It is bigger than the Rhine, only three towns are situated on it. One had nine inhabitants, another a hundred inhabitants in thirty military barracks. Friedrich, Berzejev and Lion decided on the third town of Sredni Kolymsk. Here there were huts placed far apart and only three houses with glazed windows. But within a circle of many miles it was the only place with a church, a steeple and bells—bells that had been cast in the civilized world and whose ringing was like a mother tongue.
4
The Siberian officials of the Tsar did not always deserve the bad reputation they enjoyed among the inhabitants, the condemned and even their superior authorities. Some, who considered themselves as exiles, and not without reason, were resolved to share the lot of the prisoners rather than intensify it. Many started off by avenging their fate on the condemned but mellowed after a few years when they saw that their harshness brought them no advantage. Arrogance, vanity and terror dwindled, since the controlling authorities were so far away. Others again allowed themselves to be bribed and lived on with a bad conscience. A bad conscience can make both autocrats and thugs indulgent.
Berzejev had made friends with Colonel Lelewicz, a Pole, who had assumed command of an infantry detachment in Siberia in order to have an opportunity of helping his exiled fellow-countrymen. He enjoyed such good connections in Petersburg that he did not need to conceal his sentiments behind a martial loyalty to the Tsar like other officers and officials. With his help Friedrich, Berzejev and Lion established themselves in one of the three houses furnished with windowpanes. Thus they lived in a steady private relationship with the authorities and were allowed to play cards with the officials and conduct political discussions.
Once a week the newspapers arrived, ten days old. The news they spread in this desolation resembled the stars we still see shining in the heavens though they were extinguished centuries ago. Lion affirmed that it was unimportant when one read the papers. For the very transmission of an event changes it and even denies it. That is why we find every report in the newspapers so improbable.
Lion asserted that he had been exiled only on account of his kinship with a well-known revolutionary of the same name, and that he would probably soon be released. He was, in fact, only a mild opponent of the State, favoured the introduction of a constitutional monarchy, modernization of the bureaucracy on the western model and a settlement of domestic political questions on properly applied economic principles. Between two fingers he held his pince-nez which were knotted to a broad black ribbon, threatened with them, designed interweaving arabesques in the air with them, and only settled them on the lower part of his nose when he was compelled to listen, as if Lion wanted to study his opponent better through the glass while nevertheless peering at him only over the rims of the lenses. Everything to do with natural processes was strange and disconcerting to him. He had the same respect for dogs as for wolves and bears. He hardly noticed the passage of the seasons and it made no difference to him whether the temperature was 20 or 60 degrees.
He was a constant herald of the war. 'The Social Democrats in Germany,' he exclaimed, 'have at last revealed their loyalty to the Kaiser. Herr Stücklen says: "We Social Democrats love the country in which we were born, we are better patriots than people think." Noske: "We have never entertained the idea that the frontiers of the Reich can be left unfortified without a considerable defensive army." Because the Social Democrats are for the capital levy on principle, they vote for military credits. Thus they vote for the option of throwing half a million men against the French frontier in four days. The representatives of the International concede one and half milliards to the War Minister. That is war, gentlemen,' concluded Lion, swinging his pince-nez in the air like a flag.
Berzejev and the official Efrejnov were for Germany, suspicious of France. Berzejev defended the German workers. Finally, he even compared the Tsar to the German Kaiser. 'After all,' he said, 'the Kaiser doesn't send anyone to Siberia.'
Efrejnov, who attributed everything bad in Russia to western influences, to which society, the intelligentsia and the Tsar himself were subject, felt offended. His fair beard, his broad shoulders shivered. 'It just shows,' he cried, 'how all alike you are. You believe that somewhere Russia is like the rest of the world, in one small detail at least. Not true. Russia is oriental and everything else is the rotten decaying West. Whether it's your German Kaiser, Berzejev, or your German workers, it's all one. A Kaiser who rules through Parliament and democracy, that's already the beginning of Socialism. The Kaiser, the republic, Marxism, all western ideas. The Tsar in Russia is more democratic than a socialist parliamentarian. He is sovereign by the will of the people and of the land it cultivates. The Tsar is the product of the Russian peasant. He looks after the affairs of state for which the people have no time. When did your dissatisfaction begin? Since you looked to the West and envied its civilization. Witte goes to do business with the American Jews. The Anglomaniac snob Isvolski is sent out into the world so that he can report what ties they are wearing in London and Paris. And thus you destroy the old holy autocracy of the Tsars.'
For some time Lion had been drawing restless curves in the air with his pince-nez. 'Do you imagine,' he shouted, 'that we can shut ourselves off from the West? We can't compete with world economy.
'Russia is not going to remain a nation of peasants. It is becoming industrialized. But industry dictates the political set-up. Two-thirds of our industries are in foreign hands. We produce our iron and petroleum so slowly that they do not suffice even for our own feeble production. Our coalmines deliver only 2,250 million poods as against 18 milliards in Germany and 32 milliards in the United States. The average income of a Russian subject amounts to 53 roubles a year, of a Frenchman 233, an Englishman 273, an American 345. The average Russian saves only 16 roubles a year. Our national debt amounts to 9 milliards, that is 2 roubles 80 kopecks a head. But England, which in your view belongs to the degenerate West, has a national budget of 160 million pounds sterling and underpins its economy with a further 170 millions.'
Nothing availed against Lion's figures, which he recited without the least hesitation, like a poem. As he uttered them, he drew them briskly in the air as if writing them with chalk on a blackboard. Efrejnov shook his head. Evidently he considered statistics, like Marxism, to be a product of the West and figures as crimes like assassinations. Lion had probably been sent to Siberia with more justification than the others. He regarded the ikon in the corner and the small red lamp lit a soothing gentle consolation in his heart.
5
Friedrich lit the slender candle of transparent paraffin wax.
From the ground the earth's frozen breath entered the room like a steeply rising wind. Around the house sang the still, aching cold. It was like the singing of telegraph wires.
Friedrich imagined to himself that there, in front of the house, in the impenetrable darkness, stood the smooth-planed tall posts topped with their flowers of white porcelain, linked by wires with the living world, whose forlorn voice they transformed into the clear, comforting and trustful monotony of a lullaby. When he lay down to sleep there flashed through his first slumber a rapid fancy, less than a thought and more than a dream, that his sleep would carry him towards a morning in the middle of the lively and bustling city. Berzejev still spoke to him for long stretches and did not wait for a reply. He loved his quiet younger comrade, his thin face and reserved look, and the courage with which he had joined the Revolution. 'He has no discretion,' observed Berzejev. 'His rashness hinders him from anticipating situations. But when they come he bears them steadfastly. He is easily inspired and easily disillusioned. But despondency and enthusiasm are only physiological phenomena. In reality he is melancholy, uniformly melancholy.' And Berzejev said out loud: