Three Novellas Read online

  Joseph Roth titles

  published by The Overlook Press

  The Radetzky March

  The Emperor’s Tomb

  Tarabas

  Confession of a Murderer

  Job

  Flight Without End

  The Silent Prophet

  The Spider’s Web and Zipper and His Father

  Hotel Savoy

  Right and Left

  Copyright

  This paperback edition first published in the United States in 2003 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10012

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  Fallmerayer the Stationmaster, The Bust of the Emperor

  Copyright 1975 and 1976 by Verlag Allert de Lange Amsterdam

  Translation copyright © 1986 John Hoare

  The Legend of the Holy Drinker

  Copyright © 1973 by Allert de Lange Amsterdam und Verlag Kiepenheuer und Kitsch Köln

  Translation copyright © 1992 Michael Hofmann

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-216-5

  CONTENTS

  Joseph Roth titles published by The Overlook Press

  Copyright

  Fallmerayer the Station Master

  The Bust of the Emperor

  The Legend of the Holy Drinker

  Translator’s Note

  Fallmerayer the Stationmaster

  TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN

  BY JOHN HOARE

  I

  The remarkable destiny of the Austrian stationmaster, Adam Fallmerayer, deserves without a doubt to be recorded and preserved. He lost his life, a life which, incidentally, would never have been brilliant—and perhaps not even satisfying in the long run—in the most bewildering way. Based on all the knowledge which people can have of one another, it would have been impossible to prophesy an unusual destiny for Fallmerayer. And yet it came to him, it seized him, and he even seemed to give himself up to it with a certain pleasure.

  He had been a stationmaster since 1908. Soon after taking up his duties at the station at L, on the southern line, barely two hours distant from Vienna, he married the worthy, but somewhat limited and not particularly youthful daughter of a senior chancery official in Brums. It was a “love-match,” as it used to be called in those days when “marriages of convenience” were still customary and traditional. His parents were dead. When Fallmerayer married he nonetheless obeyed the very sober dictate of his very sober heart, not the promptings of his common sense. He begot two children, girls and twins. He had expected a son. It was fundamental to his nature to expect a son and to regard the simultaneous arrival of two girls as a painful surprise, if not as a hostile act of God. Since, however, he was secure from material worries and entitled to a pension, he accustomed himself, within a bare three months of the birth, to this bounty of nature, and began to love his children. To love: in other words to care for them with the overwhelming bourgeois conscientiousness of a father and a worthy official.

  On a March day of the year 1914 Adam Fallmerayer was sitting, as usual, in his office. The telegraph ticked ceaselessly. Outside it was raining. It was an unseasonably early rain. The previous week they had still had to shovel the snow from the tracks and the trains were arriving and leaving dreadfully behind time. One night, all of a sudden, the rain began. The snow vanished, and opposite the little station, where the unattainable and dazzling splendor of the Alpine snow had seemed to praise the eternal lordship of winter, an indescribable blue-gray haze had for some days past blended clouds, sky, rain and mountain all into one. It rained, and the air was mild. Fallmerayer the stationmaster had never experienced such an early spring. The express trains which were heading south, to Meran, to Trieste and Italy never stopped at his tiny station. The expresses rushed unheedingly past Fallmerayer, who twice daily put on his brilliant scarlet cap and strode onto the platform to salute their passage. They almost degraded him to the level of signalman. The faces of the passengers behind the big windows melted into a gray-white pulp. Fallmerayer the stationmaster had seldom been able to descry the face of a passenger bound for the south, and “the South” meant more to the stationmaster than a mere geographical definition. “The South” was the sea, a sea of sunshine, freedom, happiness.

  Certainly, a free railway pass for the whole family’s holidays was to be numbered among the rights of senior officials of the southern railway. When the twins had been three years old they had journeyed to Bozen with them. They had taken the slow train for an hour to the station where the proud expresses stopped. They had climbed in, climbed out, and found themselves still a long way from the south. Their leave lasted four weeks. They saw rich people from all over the world and it seemed as though the very ones whom one saw were by coincidence the richest of all. They were not on leave. Their life was one long holiday. As far as one could see—far and wide—the richest people in the world had no twins; particularly not girls. And anyway it was the rich people who really brought “the South” to the south. An official of the southern railway lived permanently in the deep north.

  So they traveled back and took up their duties afresh.

  Fallmerayer looked up from his desk. It was five in the evening. Although the sun had not set it was dusk already, because of the rain. On the glass canopy of the platform the rain beat as unceasingly as the ticking of the telegraph, and it was a comfortable, uninterrupted dialogue between science and nature. The big, blueish flagstones beneath the platform’s canopy were dry. But the tracks—and between the tracks the little stones of the gravel—glistened despite the darkness in the moist magic of the rain.

  Although stationmaster Fallmerayer’s nature was not endowed with much fantasy, it nevertheless seemed to him that this day was quite particularly pregnant with Fate, indeed he began to tremble as he looked out of the window. The express to Meran was due in thirty-six minutes. In thirty-six minutes, so it seemed to Fallmerayer, night would be absolute, a night to be feared. Above his office, on the first floor, the twins were running wild, as usual. He could hear the patter of their childish and yet rather brutal footsteps. He opened the window. It was no longer cold. Spring had come down from over the mountains. One could hear the whistle of engines shunting, as one did every day, and the calls of the railwaymen and the dull thudding shock of the coupled wagons. All the same, today the locomotives had a special whistle, or so it seemed to Fallmerayer. He was quite an ordinary person, and nothing seemed odder to him than thinking he detected on this day, among the usual and quite unsurprising noises, the sound of an uncommon destiny. In fact, it was on this day that the terrifying catastrophe happened, as the result of which Adam Fall merayer’s life was to be completely altered.

  II

  The express had already been announced as a little late on leaving B. Two minutes before it was due through L it collided, as the result of a set of points being misplaced, with a stationary goods train. The catastrophe was there. Hastily grasping some entirely ineffective lanterns, Fallmerayer the stationmaster ran along the tracks towards the site of the disaster. He had felt the need to grasp some concrete object. It seemed to him out of the question that he should run towards the trouble with empty, as it were weaponless, hands. He ran for ten minutes, coatless, the rain whipping ceaselessly against his neck and shoulders.

  By the time he reached the scene of the accident, people had just begun to pull out the dead, the injured and the trapped. It grew darker than ever, as if night itself were hurrying to do justice to the first shock and to increase it. The fire brigade came from the little town with flares which crackled and hissed as they fought to beat off the rain. Thirteen coaches lay splintered on the tracks. They had dragged out the driver and his fireman. They were both dead. Railwaymen, firemen and passengers labored at the wreck with anything they could lay their hands on. The injured cried piteously, the rain poured down, the flares hissed. The stationmaster was freezing in the rain. His teeth chattered. He had the feeling that he should be doing something, like the others, but at the same time he was afraid that they might prevent him from helping because it was possible that he himself might have been responsible for the accident. Now and again one or other of the railwaymen who knew him greeted him fleetingly in the urgency of their duty, and Fallmerayer would attempt tonelessly to say something which might equally easily have been an order or a prayer for forgiveness. But nobody heard him. He had never before felt himself so superfluous on this world. He was just beginning to regret that he himself had not been among the victims, when his eye aimlessly fell on a woman who had just been laid on a stretcher. There she lay, abandoned by her rescuers, her great dark eyes bent on the flares nearest to her, covered to her hips in a silver-gray fur coat, and obviously in no condition to move. The rain fell incessantly on her pale broad face and the light of the flares flickered over her. Her face gleamed, wet and silvery, in the magical interchange of flame and shadow. Her long white hands lay on her coat, motionless also, like two wondrous corpses. It seemed to the stationmaster that this woman on h
er stretcher was lying in a great white island of peace in the midst of a deafening sea of sound and fury, that she even emanated silence. In fact, it seemed as though all the hurrying, busy people wished to make a detour about the stretcher on which the woman lay. Was she already dead? Fallmerayer the stationmaster slowly approached the stretcher.

  The woman was still alive. She had been uninjured. As Fallmerayer bent over her she spoke, before he had asked her a question, almost as if she were rather afraid of his question. There was nothing she needed and she thought she could get to her feet. At worst, she had nearly lost her luggage. She could certainly get up. And she at once made as if to do so. Fallmerayer helped her. He took the fur over his left arm, placed his right arm around her shoulders, waited until she was on her feet, laid the fur over her shoulders and his arm over the fur and so they went, without a word, a little way across the tracks and the rubble into the nearby cottage of a pointsman, up a few steps and into the dry, bright warmth.

  “You sit quietly here for a few minutes,” said Fallmerayer, “I have work to do out there. I’ll be back soon.”

  At the same instant he knew that he was lying, and probably for the first time in his life. Nevertheless, the lie seemed natural to him. Although at that moment he could have wished nothing better than to stay by the woman, it would have seemed terrible to him that she should regard him as someone useless who had nothing better to do while outside a thousand hands were helping and rescuing. So he went out quickly and found, to his own astonishment, that he now had the strength and courage to help, to rescue, to give an order here and advice there. And although he could only think of the woman in the cottage, as he helped, rescued and worked, and although the idea that he might not see her later was gruesome and frightening, he still stayed and worked at the scene of the catastrophe, out of fear that he might leave much too soon and thus expose his uselessness to strangers. And as they followed him with their eyes and stimulated him to greater effort, so he quickly gained confidence in his word and his good sense and revealed himself to be a nimble, clever and courageous helper.

  He therefore worked for something like two hours, constantly thinking of the waiting stranger. When the doctor and the nurses had given the necessary first aid to the injured, Fallmerayer turned back towards the pointsman’s cottage. He quickly told the doctor, whom he knew, that over there was yet another casualty of the accident. He studied his battered hands and torn uniform with a certain self-consciousness. He led the doctor into the pointsman’s room and greeted the stranger, who did not seem to have moved from her chair, with the cheerful and intimate smile which one reserves for old and close friends after a long separation.

  “Examine the lady!” he said to the doctor, and went to the door. He waited outside for a couple of minutes.

  The doctor came and said, “A little shock. Nothing more. It would be best if she stayed here. Have you room in your house?”

  “Certainly, certainly!” said Fallmerayer. And between them they led the stranger into the station and up the stairs to the stationmaster’s living quarters.

  “In three or four days she’ll be perfectly sound,” said the doctor.

  At that moment Fallmerayer wished she needed many more days than that.

  III

  Fallmerayer turned over his room and his bed to the stranger. The stationmaster’s wife shuttled busily between the invalid and the children. Twice a day Fallmerayer looked in himself. Stringent orders were given to the children to keep quiet.

  By the following day the traces of the accident had been dragged to one side, the customary inquiry instituted, Fallmerayer interrogated and the guilty pointsman dismissed from service. Twice a day, as before, express trains tore past Fallmerayer at the station.

  The evening after the disaster Fallmerayer learnt the stranger’s name: she was a Countess Walewska, a Russian from the Kiev area, traveling from Vienna to Meran. Part of her luggage turned up and was brought to her; black and brown leather suitcases. They smelt of cuir de Russie and unknown scents. The whole of Fallmerayer’s quarters smelt of them.

  Now that he had lent his bed he did not sleep in Frau Fallmerayer’s, but down below in his office. This meant he did not sleep at all. He lay awake. Towards nine in the morning he visited the room in which the strange woman lay. He asked if she had slept well, whether she had breakfasted and if she felt well. He would take fresh violets to the vase on the sideboard on which the old ones had stood before, remove the old ones, put the fresh ones into fresh water and then remain standing at the foot of the bed. Before him lay the strange lady, on her pillow, under her bedclothes. He mumbled something inaudible. On the stationmaster’s pillow, beneath his bedclothes, lay the strange woman with her big dark eyes and white, strong face, as remote as an alien but sweet landscape. “Do sit down,” she said, twice each day. She spoke the hard, alien German of the Russians, in a deep, strange voice. All the splendor of the far off and the unknown was in that voice. Fallmerayer did not sit down.

  “Excuse me, but I have a lot to do,” said he, turning about and leaving the room.

  So it went on for six days. On the seventh the doctor advised her to continue her journey. Her husband was awaiting her in Meran. So she went on her way, leaving behind her in all the rooms, and particularly in Fallmerayer’s bed, an inextinguishable trace of cuir de Russie and some nameless scent.

  IV

  This remarkable scent stayed in the house, and in the memory, not to say the heart of Fallmerayer much longer than did the catastrophe. And during the weeks which followed, during which the boring investigation of more precise facts and more detailed origins of the accident pursued their routine course and Fallmerayer was heard a couple of times, he never stopped thinking of the foreigner and gave almost confused answers to plain questions, as if he had been made deaf by the perfume she had left around him and to him. Had his duties not been comparatively simple and he himself not virtually become over the years an almost mechanical part of the service he could not in all conscience have continued in his duties.

  Secretly he hoped that each mail would bring news of the stranger. He had no doubt that she would write once, if only to thank him for his hospitality and as a matter of courtesy. And one day a big dark blue envelope did arrive. The Walewska wrote that she traveled further south with her husband. At the moment she was in Rome. She and her husband wanted to go on to Sicily. The following day an elegant basket of fruit arrived for the twins and a bouquet of very delicate and scented white roses for the stationmaster’s wife, from Countess Walewska’s husband. It had been a long while, wrote the Countess, before she had found time to thank her kindly hosts, but after her arrival in Meran she had taken some time to recover from her shock and she had needed to convalesce. Fallmerayer carried home the fruit and flowers at once. Although the letter had arrived a day earlier, the stationmaster nonetheless held onto it rather longer. The scent of fruit and roses from the south was strong, but to Fallmerayer it seemed as if the scent of the Countess’s letter were even stronger. It was a short letter. Fallmerayer knew it by heart. He knew the exact position of each word. Written with big bold strokes in lilac ink, the letters stood out like a lovely host of slender birds in strange plumage, swooping across a dark blue back ground. “Anja Walewska,” ran the signature. He had long been curious about the stranger’s Christian name, as though this name were one of her hidden bodily charms, but he had never dared to ask about it. For a while, now that he did know it, it was as though she had made him a present of a delicious secret. And out of a jealous wish to keep it for himself alone he only made up his mind two days later to show it to his wife. From the moment that he knew the Walewska’s Christian name he became aware that his wife’s name—she was called Klara—was not beautiful. As he saw with what indifferent hands Frau Klara unfolded the stranger’s letter, the hands of the foreigner came back to his mind, just as he had first seen them on her furs; motionless hands, two gleaming, silvery hands. I should have kissed them then, he thought for a moment.

  “A very nice letter,” said his wife and put the letter aside. Her eyes were steel blue, conscientious and not in the least concerned. Frau Klara Fallmerayer had the ability even to raise worries to the level of duties and to derive satisfaction from feeling concerned. It seemed to Fallmerayer, to whom ideas and insights of this sort had always been alien, that he was suddenly aware of this. And that night he gave as a pretext some urgent official duty in order to avoid the room they shared and to lie down to sleep in his office, where he tried to persuade himself that the foreigner was still sleeping above him, in his own bed.