The Silent Prophet (4 page)

One of those present was powerful and broad-shouldered. He kept his large hairy fists on the table. His skull was round and bald, his eyebrows so thin and sparse as to be barely visible, his eyes small and bright, his mouth red and fleshy, his chin like a block of marble. He wore a red Russian blouse of some shiny material with a strong reflection, and no one could see him without at once thinking of an executioner. He was Comrade P., a Ukrainian, placid, even-tempered and trustworthy, and with a remarkable cunning which was hidden under his bulk like silver under the earth. Next to him sat Comrade T., a yellow-brown face with a black moustache and a wide black imperial, eyeglasses on his prominent nose, and dark eyes which seemed to betray a kind of restless hunger. Opposite him stood the momentarily empty chair of the third comrade. He was the most restless of them all and the frailty of his limbs, the pallor of his skin, justified his unease.

He had just been speaking when Friedrich entered and was now drumming with lean fingers on the dark window-pane as if telegraphing morse signals into the night. His face bore a modest thin nautical beard like a faded frame round a portrait. His eyes were hard and bright when he removed his spectacles. Behind them they looked thoughtful and wise. This was R., with whom Friedrich struck up a rapid friendship at the time, and whose enemy he was later to become.

The sentence which still rang in Friedrich's ears immediately revealed the speaker to him. 'I'll be hanged,' he had said, before at once correcting himself, 'that is, they can hang me if we have a war within five years.'

Then there was silence for a time. Savelli got up, recognized Friedrich at once, and signed to him to sit where he liked. Friedrich looked round in vain and sat down cautiously on a pile of books on the sofa.

No one paid him any attention. P. stood up. His great bulk immediately darkened the room. He took up a stance behind the back of his chair and said: 'There's no other possibility. One of us has to go. The situation is so critical that we may all be for it overnight. Then the connection will be broken and the money lost over there for good. Berzejev is an officer, he has to look after his own interests. Desertion will be difficult for him. I have a direct report. He writes that he was jittery right through the manoeuvres. When he got back, Levicki was in Kiev, Gelber in Odessa. No one in Kharkov.'

'You'll have to go yourself,' interrupted Savelli.

'Make your will! ' cried R.

'Comrade R. is nervous as usual,' said Savelli very softly.

'I don't deny it,' retorted R. smilingly, thereby displaying two rows of strikingly white and even teeth which no one would have suspected behind his narrow lips. The teeth emitted a fearsome gleam so that the sensitive peaceable nature of his face vanished and even his eyes became malicious.

'I've never claimed to be a hero and don't intend to risk my life. In any case, Savelli gives me no opportunity.'

They all laughed, except for the one with the dark hair. He shook his head, his pince-nez quivered and, as he gave the dangling lamp which now obstructed his view a shove so that it began to swing even more wildly, looking like a large irritated moth, he banged his other hand on the table and said resentfully: 'Don't be funny.'

When they broke up they shook Friedrich's hand, as if he were an old acquaintance.

'I saw you once on the Ring,' Savelli said to him. 'What are you doing now? Are you working? I don't mean studying.' He meant whether Friedrich was working for the Cause. Friedrich confessed that he was doing nothing. Savelli spoke of the war. It might break out within a week. The Russian General Staff was at work in Serbia. Russian agents trailed the émigrés in Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Suspicious customers had appeared several weeks ago in a café they frequented in the 9th precinct. Would Friedrich put in an appearance?

'I'll meet you again, here or at the café,' said Friedrich.

'Good-day!' said Savelli, as if he were taking leave of a man who had given him a light.

R. was without doubt the most interesting man besides P., Dr T., and Savelli. A number of younger men gathered round him and formed his 'group'. They walked through the late still nights. R. addressed them, they hung on his words.

'Tell me,' he began, 'whether this world isn't as quiet as a cemetery. People sleep in their beds like graves, they read a leading article, dunk a crisp croissant in their coffee, the whipped cream spills over the edge of the cup. Then they tap their egg carefully with the knife, out of respect for their own breakfast. The children saunter off to school with satchels and dangling blackboard sponges to learn about emperors and wars. The workers have already been at work in the factories for a long time, young girls glueing cartridges, big men cutting steel. For some hours, soldiers have been at exercise in the fields.

Trumpets blare. Meanwhile it's ten o'clock, councillors and ministers drive up to their offices, sign, sign, telegraph, dictate, telephone; typists sit in editorial offices and take dictation, pass it to editors who conceal and disclose, disguise and reveal. And as if nothing eventful had happened during the day, bells shrill to signal in the evening and the theatres fill with women, flowers and perfume. And then the world falls asleep again. But we are awake. We hear the ministers come and go, the kings and emperors groaning in their sleep, we hear how the steel is sharpened in the factories, we hear the birth of the big guns and the soft rustle of papers on the desks of diplomats. Already we see the great conflagration, from which men can no longer salvage their small sorrows and their small joys ... .'

8

Friedrich now worked—as he and his friends tended to say—'for the Cause'. He got himself into the habit of obtaining the enthusiasm, without which he could not live, from renunciation and anonymity. He even charmed a stimulus from the inexorability he had so feared, comfort from despair. He was young. And he believed not only in the efficacy of sacrifice, but also in the reward which engarlands sacrifice like flowers a grave. And yet there were hours, his 'weak' ones as he called them, in which he indulged a private hope that the Idea might triumph, and that he might live to experience it. But he owned to this only when he met R.

'Don't worry about that!' said R. 'I believe only in the altruism of the dead. We would all like to experience the right moment and a sweet revenge.'

'Except Savelli!' said Friedrich.

'You deceive yourself,' replied R., not without malevolence, or so it seemed to me at the time. 'You don't know Savelli. People will only understand him when it's too late. He acts the part of a man who no longer owns his heart because he has presented it to mankind. But don't be taken in, he has none. I prefer an egoist. Egoism is a sign of humanity. But our friend is not human. He has the temperament of a crocodile in the drought, the imagination of a groom, the idealism of an Izvoschik.'

'But what about all he's done so far?'

'A stupid error, to judge men by their deeds. Forget the bourgeois historians! Men get involved with affairs as innocently as they do with dreams. Our friend could just as well have organized pogroms as robbed banks!'

'Then why does he stay in our camp?'

'Because he's not talented enough, in our view, not versatile enough to free himself from the weight of his past. Men of his kind keep to their chosen path. He's no traitor. But he is our enemy. He hates us, as Russian peasants hate city intellectuals. He hates me in particular.'

'Why you in particular?'

'Because he has good cause to. Look at it properly. I'm no Russian. I'm a European. I know that I am separated from our comrades much more than most of us intellectuals are from the proletarians. I'm unlucky. I have a western education. Although I'm a radical, I like the centre. Although I prepare for the great uprising, I like moderation. I can't help myself.'

R. abandoned himself to the gusto of his formulation. And Friedrich copied him. Both began to outdo each other in contradictions. From both at that time one could hear a statement which was startling then and today sounds almost obvious: 'The Tsar is no gentleman, he's a bourgeois. He marks the beginning of the democratic era in Russia, the era of a democracy of small peasants—and you'll see, Savelli's friends will push on with the work. If the Tsar doesn't hang us, they will.'

It was as if R. had set out systematically to destroy Friedrich's fervour, his romantic enthusiasm for all the trappings of secret conspiracy. In R.'s company, even danger gained a ridiculous aspect. 'It's no lie,' he would say in the halls which stank of beer, pipe tobacco and sweat, 'that it's easier to die for the masses than to live with them.' Then he would step onto the platform, demand stronger support for the Party, threaten the ruling class, shout for blood, and cry: 'Long live the World Revolution!'

The police inspector would blow his whistle, the officers stormed into the hall, the meeting broke up. R. disappeared in a flash. He did not expose himself to the fists of the police.

It may well be that Friedrich would have taken another path if he had not become R.'s friend. For ultimately it was R. who instigated Friedrich to go to Russia, who aroused the younger man's ambition, the naïve ambition to demonstrate that one was not a 'fainthearted intellectual'. But there was also another factor.

I have the suspicion that Friedrich's voluntary journey to Russia, which ended ultimately in a compulsory spell in Siberia, was the foolish outcome of a foolish infatuation which he took for hopeless at the time and whose importance he plainly exaggerated. But we have no right to enquire into the personal motives for an action that Friedrich wanted to carry out in the service of his Idea. We must content ourselves with a description of certain events.

9

He thought no more of the woman in the carriage—or he imagined that he had forgotten her. But one day, by chance, he saw her again—and he was startled. For it was like an encounter with a picture come to life which had been left in store in a particular room in a particular museum, or an encounter with a forgotten idea which has remained in a deep and hidden region of the memory. He no longer remembered who she was when she asked him in a corridor at the University where Lecture Theatre 24 was. He only recognized her after she had disappeared. Like a distant star, she had occupied a few seconds in impinging on his retina. He followed her. In the darkened room someone was reading aloud about some painter or other, someone was showing various lantern-slides, and the darkness was like a second smaller room within the hall. It enclosed both her and him with equal density.

He waited. He did not hear a single word or see a single picture. He saw that the door opened, and that she left the hall.

He followed her at a distance which seemed to be ordained and laid down by adoration. He was afraid that a side-street might swallow her, a carriage bear her away, an acquaintance await her. His tender gaze seized the distant brown shimmer of her profile between the edge of her fur collar and her dark hat. The regular rhythm of her steps imparted gentle wavy movements to the soft material of her jacket, to her hips and back. She stopped in front of a small shop in a quiet side-street and laid a hesitant, pensive hand on the door-handle. She went in. He came nearer. He looked through the window. She was sitting at the table, face turned towards him, trying on gloves. She was leaning on her left hand, her fingers were outspread in patient expectation. She slipped on the new leather, closed her hand into a fist and opened it again, stroked the left hand caressingly with the right, and unfolded joints and fingers in attractive and absorbing play.

She left the shop. He had no time to move away. Her first glance fell on him and, as he involuntarily removed his hat, she stood there as if she intended to acknowledge him, as if she was considering whether she should assume the indifferent smile suited to acquaintances one has forgotten. Eventually, as he made no move, she turned to go. He came a step closer. She was visibly embarrassed. The urge to fly seized him together with the fear of ridicule. The awareness that he must say something the very next moment was surpassed by the silent avowal that he could think of nothing to say. The soft oval of her brown face confused him by its proximity, like her startled dark gaze and the delicate bluish skin of her eyelids, and even the small parcel she held in her hand. 'If only she didn't continue to smile,' he thought. 'I must make it clear to her at once that I am not one of her acquaintances.' So, hat in hand, he said: 'I can't help it if you're alarmed. The situation was too much for me. I followed you unintentionally. You left the shop before I expected. I accosted you without knowing you. I have therefore misled you without intending to do so. Please forgive me.'

As he was speaking he was surprised by the calmness and precision of his words. Her smile vanished and reappeared. It was like a light that comes and goes.

'I quite understand,' she said.

Friedrich bowed, she likewise attempted an acknowledgment, and both laughed.

He was surprised to find that she was not married. He could not understand now why he had taken her for a married woman. Also, it was not her carriage in which she had been travelling that August day. The carriage belonged to her friend, Frau G., to whom she had been invited. Was she a student? No, she only attended the lectures of Professor D., who was a family friend. Her father, as is the way of some old gentlemen, did not permit her to study. She would certainly have had her way if her mother had been alive. Her mother would have been helpful. And a transient sadness passed over her face.

She stood in front of a cab-rank, she was due at the theatre, she had an appointment. Already Friedrich saw a coachman jump down from his box and strip the blankets from the back of his horse.

'I should very much like to come with you, if you've the time,' said Friedrich quickly.

She laughed. He was embarrassed. 'Let's go then,' she said, 'but right away.'

Now it was done he could no longer speak calmly. The talk was only on neutral topics, the hard winter and Professor D., the tedious public and private balls, the meanness of rich people and the poor street lighting. She vanished into the theatre.