Weights and Measures Read online

  Joseph Roth

  * * *

  WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

  Translated from the German by David Le Vay

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

  Joseph Roth was born in 1894 into a Jewish family living in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and now split between Poland and Ukraine. He became a successful journalist and travelled widely, eventually becoming best known for his novels The Radetzky March (also in Penguin Modern Classics), The Emperor’s Tomb and The Legend of the Holy Drinker. He died in Paris in 1939.

  1

  Once upon a time in the District of Zlotogrod there lived an Inspector of Weights and Measures whose name was Anselm Eibenschütz. His duty consisted of checking the weights and measures of the tradesmen in the entire district. So, at specified intervals, Eibenschütz went from shop to shop and investigated the yardsticks and the scales and the weights. He was accompanied by a sergeant of gendarmerie in full panoply. Thus the State made manifest its intention to use arms, if necessary, to punish cheats, in accordance with the commandment proclaimed in the Holy Scriptures, which considers a cheat to be the same as a thief …

  As for Zlotogrod, it was a pretty extensive district. It included four largish villages, two important market centres and finally the little town of Zlotogrod itself.

  For his official business the Inspector used an official, one-horse, two-wheeled gig, together with a grey horse for whose upkeep Eibenschütz was personally responsible.

  The grey was of a dignified disposition. It had spent three years in the army service corps and had only been transferred to the civil authorities because of a sudden blindness of the left eye which even the veterinary surgeon had been unable to account for. All in all, it was a stately grey, harnessed to a nimble golden-yellow gig. In it, on many a day, beside Inspector Eibenschütz, sat the sergeant of gendarmerie, Wenzel Slama. On his sand-coloured helmet glittered the golden spike and the imperial double eagle. Between his knees projected his rifle with fixed bayonet atop. The Inspector held reins and whip in his hand. His fair, soft moustache, assiduously waxed in an upward curve, gleamed with the same golden hue as the double eagle and the spiked helmet. It seemed to be made from the same material. From time to time the whip cracked gaily, as if it were actually laughing. The grey galloped along with haughty elegance and with the dash of an active cavalry horse. And on hot summer days, when the streets and roads of the Zlotogrod District were quite dry and almost thirsty, there arose an enormous golden-grey swirl of dust which enveloped the grey, the gig, the sergeant and the Inspector. In winter, however, Anselm Eibenschütz had at his disposal a small two-seater sleigh. The grey galloped with the same elegance in winter as in summer. It was no longer a golden-grey swirl of dust but a silver flurry of snow that shrouded the sergeant, the Inspector and the sleigh in invisibility, and the grey most of all for he was almost as white as the snow.

  Anselm Eibenschütz, our Inspector of Weights and Measures, was a very imposing man. He was an old soldier. He had spent his twelve years as a long-serving non-commissioned officer in the Eleventh Artillery Regiment. He had, one might say, risen from the ranks. He had been an honest soldier. And he would never have abandoned the military if his wife, in her rigorous, even inflexible, manner, had not compelled him to do so.

  He had married, as almost all long-serving non-commissioned officers are in the habit of doing. Ah, they are lonely, the long-serving non-commissioned officers! They see only men, nothing but men! The women they encounter flutter past them like swallows. They marry, the non-commissioned officers, to keep hold of at least one single swallow, as it were.

  Thus the long-serving gunner Eibenschütz had married, too – an indifferent woman, as anyone might have seen. It grieved him to give up his uniform. He had no liking for civilian clothes, he felt rather like a snail constrained to abandon the house which it has built out of its own saliva, that is to say out of its own flesh and blood, a quarter of a snail’s life long. But much the same happened to other comrades. The majority had wives: from error, from loneliness, from love – who is to say which! All obeyed their wives: from fear and from chivalry and from habit and from dread of loneliness – who is to say which! But, in a word, Eibenschütz left the army. He doffed his uniform, his cherished uniform; he abandoned the barracks, the cherished barracks.

  Every long-serving non-commissioned officer is entitled to a position. Eibenschütz, who came from the small Moravian town of Nikolsburg, had for long endeavoured to return to his homeland as a bailiff or a lawyer’s clerk since he was, thanks to his wife, compelled to leave the army, his second and perhaps his actual Nikolsburg. But at that time neither bailiffs nor lawyer’s clerks were needed anywhere in Moravia. All Eibenschütz’s applications were turned down.

  Then, for the first time, he was seized with a real rage against his wife. And he, an artilleryman who had endured so many manoeuvres and superiors, made a solemn resolve that, from then on, he would be firm towards his wife; her name was Regina. She had fallen in love with him one day in his uniform – five years ago to be exact. Now, after she had seen and possessed him on many a night, naked and without uniform, she demanded of him civilian clothes, and a position, and a home and children and grandchildren, and the Lord knows what else!

  But rage was of no avail to Anselm Eibenschütz after he had received the news that the post of an Inspector of Weights and Measures was going in Zlotogrod.

  He demobilized. He abandoned the barracks, his uniform, his comrades and friends.

  He travelled to Zlotogrod.

  2

  The Zlotogrod District lay in the remote eastern part of the monarchy, a region in which there had previously been a worthless Inspector. A long time ago – the older ones could still remember it – there had been real weights and measures! Now there were only scales. Only scales. Cloth was measured with the arm, and as all the world knows, a man’s arm, from his closed fist to his elbow, measures an ell, no more and no less. Moreover, all the world knew that a silver candlestick weighed a pound and twenty grams, and a brass candlestick about two pounds. Indeed, in those parts, there were many folk who really had no use for weights and measures. They weighed in the hand and measured with the eye. It was not a propitious district for a public Inspector of Weights and Measures.

  As has been said, there had been another Inspector in the Zlotogrod District before the arrival of the artilleryman Anselm Eibenschütz. An Inspector of a kind! Old and infirm and addicted to alcohol, he had never checked the weights and measures in the little town of Zlotog
rod itself, still less in the villages and market-places that belonged to the district. That is why, when the time came for him to be buried, he had an extraordinarily fine funeral. All the merchants followed his coffin: those who weighed with false weights, that is with the silver and brass candlesticks, those who measured with the arm, from closed fist to elbow, and many others who bitterly bewailed, without self-interest and merely as it were on principle, that an Inspector of Weights had passed away who could hardly have possessed any kind of weight himself. For the people of this district regarded all those who made inflexible reference to law, statute, justice and the State as born enemies. To keep the prescribed weights and measures in their shops was as much as they could reconcile with their conscience. What, then, were they to make of the arrival of a new and conscientious Inspector? The suspicion with which Anselm Eibenschütz was welcomed in Zlotogrod matched the grief with which the old Inspector had been borne to the grave.

  For it was evident at the first glance that he was neither old, nor infirm, nor given to drink, but, on the contrary, imposing, forceful and honest: above all, too honest.

  3

  Under such unfavourable circumstances Anselm Eibenschütz took up his new post in the Zlotogrod District. He arrived in spring, on one of the last days of March. In the Bosnian barracks of artilleryman Eibenschütz the squirrels had already begun to glow softly, and so had the laburnum; the blackbirds were already fluting on the lawn, the larks already trilling in the air. When Eibenschütz arrived in northern Zlotogrod the thick white snow still lay in the streets and sharp, pitiless icicles hung from the eaves. For the first few days Eibenschütz went about like one who has suddenly been struck deaf. True, he understood the language of the country, but what mattered was to understand not so much what the people said as what the land itself uttered. And the land spoke a terrifying language: it spoke of snow, darkness, cold and icicles, even though the calendar said it was spring and the violets in the woods of the Bosnian garrison at Sipolje had long since been in bloom. But here in Zlotogrod the crows cawed in the bare pastures and in the chestnut trees. They hung on the bare stripped branches in clusters, not like birds at all but like a kind of winged fruit. The little river – it was called the Struminka – still slept under a heavy sheet of ice and the children skated merrily over it, and their merriment made the poor Inspector feel even more melancholy.

  Suddenly, in the night, when midnight had not yet struck from the church tower, Eibenschütz heard a great cracking as the icy sheet split open. Although, as stated, it was the middle of the night, all at once the icicles on the eaves began to melt and the drops fell hard onto the wooden pavement. A soft sweet wind from the south, a nocturnal brother of the sun, had induced them to melt. Windows opened in every cottage, people appeared at the windows, many even left their houses. In a bright blue shining sky stood the gold and silver stars – cold, eternal, brilliant, as if, from above, they too were listening to the cracking and rumbling. Many of the inhabitants dressed hurriedly, as one does when a fire breaks out, and made for the river. With storm lanterns and lamps they stationed themselves on the banks and watched as the ice burst and the river awoke from its winter sleep. Some, like playful children, hopped on to one of the large drifting floes, floated rapidly downstream and, lantern in hand, signalled with it to those remaining on the bank before, eventually, alighting on the bank again. All behaved exuberantly and foolishly. For the first time since his arrival the Inspector began to talk with various inhabitants of the little town. They asked the Inspector whence he came and what he intended to do there. He replied, friendly and contented.

  He stayed awake the whole night, together with the inhabitants of the town. In the morning, when he returned home and the cracking of the ice had already abated, he felt sad and lonely once more. For the first time he experienced with a shudder a sense of what was to come. He felt that here in Zlotogrod his destiny would be fulfilled. And, for the first time in his entire brave life he was afraid. For the first time, as he arrived home in the greying dawn and lay down on the bed, he was unable to sleep. He woke his wife, Regina. Strange thoughts came to him, he had to express them. He had really wanted to ask why man was so alone. But he was ashamed and merely said: ‘Regina, now we are quite alone!’

  The woman sat upright against the pillows, in a lilac nightgown. The dawn filtered sparsely through the chinks in the shutters. The woman reminded Eibenschütz of a tulip which had begun to fade during this first spring night in Zlotogrod. ‘Regina,’ said Eibenschütz, ‘I am afraid I should never have left the barracks!’

  ‘Three years of barracks are quite enough for me,’ said the woman, ‘now let me sleep!’

  And immediately she sank back into the pillows. Eibenschütz pushed open a shutter and looked out at the street. But the dawn too looked faded. Quite faded. Even the dawn looked faded.

  4

  All around there were children. There were children all around. The sergeant of gendarmerie Wenzel Slama had even had twins twice in succession within twenty months. The place swarmed with children. Wherever Eibenschütz turned he saw children. They played in the gutters with the dirty water. They played marbles in the dry. They played on the old benches of Zlotogrod’s miserable park, a consumptive park, a moribund park. They played in rain and storm. They played ball and hoops and skittles. Wherever Inspector Eibenschütz turned he saw children, nothing but children. The district was fruitful, there was no doubt.

  If only Inspector Eibenschütz had had children! Everything would have been different: at least so it seemed to him.

  He was very lonely and he felt strange and homeless in his unaccustomed civilian clothes after being housed for twelve years in his dark-brown artillery uniform. He had his wife to be sure, but what was she to him? For the first time he asked himself why and to what end he had married her. And he was mightily alarmed. He was mightily alarmed because he had never really believed himself capable of alarm. It seemed to him that he had, as it were, been thrown off-course – and yet he had repeatedly and steadfastly kept to the right path! Nevertheless, faithful to soldierly discipline and from fear of fear, he devoted himself to his office and his duties. Never before, in this district, had there been an Inspector so devoted to state and statute, weights and measures.

  He suddenly discovered that he did not love his wife. For now that he was alone and lonely – in the town, in the district, in his official position, among men – he desired love and intimacy at home and he saw that neither of these could be found there. Sometimes in the night he sat up in bed and contemplated his wife. In the yellowish gleam of the nightlight, which stood on top of the wardrobe and seemed to intensify the darkness by creating a kind of luminous nocturnal essence in the room, the sleeping Frau Regina seemed to Inspector Eibenschütz like a dried fruit. He sat up in bed and regarded her closely. The longer he looked at her, the lonelier he felt. It was as if the mere sight of her made him lonely. She did not belong to him, to Anselm Eibenschütz, at all as she lay there, with her fine breasts and her peaceful childish face, the boldly arched eyebrows, the attractive half-open mouth and the small faint gleam of teeth between dark-red lips. Desire no longer urged him towards her as it had done in former nights. Did he still love her? Did he still desire her?

  He was very lonely, was Inspector Eibenschütz. By day and by night he was lonely.

  5

  After he had spent four weeks in the Zlotogrod District, the sergeant, Wenzel Slama, suggested that he should join the savings-group of the older government officials. This group numbered bailiffs, legal clerks and even clerks of the courts among its members. They all played tarock and baccarat. Twice a week they gathered in the Café Bristol, the only café in the town of Zlotogrod. All the members of the group met Inspector Eibenschütz with mistrust, not only because he was a stranger and a newcomer but because they supposed him to be a thoroughly honest man who had not yet become a lost soul.

  For they themselves were lost souls. They suffered themselves to be
bribed and they bribed others. They defrauded God and the world and their superiors. But even the superiors in turn defrauded their higher superiors, who dwelt in the larger, more distant towns. In the group of older government officials one defrauded the other at cards; and not so much out of pure lust for gain but for the sheer pleasure of cheating. But Anselm Eibenschütz did not cheat. And what incensed his friends even more against him was not so much that he himself did not cheat but, above all, that he was indifferent to the cheating to which he fell victim. Therefore he appeared to isolate himself from the others in a deliberately hostile manner. And so he felt even more lonely in their midst.

  The merchants hated him – with one single exception, of whom we shall speak later. They hated him because they feared him. When they saw him arrive in his golden-yellow gig, the gendarme at his side, they even dared to close their doors. They were well aware that they would be obliged to open their shops as soon as the gendarme had knocked three times. So they closed their doors merely to irritate Inspector Eibenschütz. For he had already reported several shopkeepers and brought them before the court.

  When he came home late in the evening, soaked with perspiration in summer, half-frozen in winter, his wife awaited him with a sombre brow. How had he been able to endure living with such a total stranger for so long! It seemed to him as if he had only recently got to know her and always, the moment before he entered the house, he was afraid that she might have changed since yesterday and become another new, but equally sinister, person. Usually she sat knitting under the ring-burner, diligent, spiteful and embittered in her humility. Yet she was pretty to look at, with her smooth black cap of hair and her sulky short upper lip, which feigned a childish petulance. She merely raised her eyes, while her hands continued to knit. ‘Shall we eat now?’ she asked. ‘Yes!’ he said. She laid down her knitting, a dangerous poison-green ball of wool with two menacing needles and a half-begun scrap of stocking which actually resembled a remnant, a product not yet born and already dismembered. Crash, crash, crash! Eibenschütz gazed at it while he heard the distressing noises his wife made in the kitchen and the strident and vulgar voice of the servant girl. Though he was hungry he wished that his wife might stay in the kitchen for as long as possible. Why were there no children in the house?