Job (21 page)

All accompanied Mendel to the car. At this window and that neighbors stood and looked down. Mendel fetched his keys, unlocked the shop again, went into the back room and took the little red velvet sack from the nail. He blew on it to free it from the dust, rolled down the shutters, locked up and gave Skovronnek the keys. Holding the sack, he climbed into the car. The engine rattled. The headlights shone. From this window and that voices called: “Goodbye, Mendel.” Mendel Singer grasped Menkes by the sleeve and said: “Tomorrow, at the prayer, you will announce that I am donating three hundred dollars to the poor. Farewell!”

And he drove at his son's side to Forty-fourth and Broadway, the Astor Hotel.

^*
Perhaps to avoid terms that would be unfamiliar to non-Jewish readers of his time, Roth refers to the Jewish Passover feast,
Pesach,
by the name of the Christian holiday Easter (
Ostern
in German) celebrated at the same time of year and calls
matzoh,
the unleavened bread eaten at Passover, “Easter bread” (
Osterbrot
).[Translator]

Pitiful and stooped, in a green shimmering coat, holding the little red velvet sack, Mendel Singer entered the lobby, observed the electric light, the blond porter, the white bust of an unknown god at the foot of the stairs and the black Negro who tried to take the sack from him. He stepped into the elevator and saw himself in the mirror next to his son, he closed his eyes, for he felt dizzy. He had already died, he was floating in heaven, it would never end. His son grasped him by the hand, the elevator stopped, Mendel walked on a soundless carpet through a long corridor. He didn't open his eyes until he stood in the room. As was his wont, he went immediately to the window. There he saw for the first time the American night from up close, the reddened sky, the flaming, sparkling, dripping, glowing, red, blue, green, silver, golden letters, pictures and signs. He heard the noisy song of America, the honking, the tooting, the roaring, the ringing, the screeching, the creaking, the whistling and the howling. Opposite the window on which Mendel was leaning appeared every five seconds the broad laughing face of a girl, composed entirely of sprayed sparks and points, the blinding teeth in the open mouth made of a piece of melted silver. A ruby red, foaming goblet floated toward this face, tipped of its own accord, poured its contents into the open mouth and withdrew, to reappear newly filled, ruby red and foaming over with white froth. It was an advertisement for a new soda. Mendel
admired it as the most perfect representation of the night's happiness and of golden health. He smiled, watched the picture come and disappear a few times and turned back to the room. There stood his white bed with the covers turned back. Menuchim was rocking in a rocking chair. “I won't sleep tonight,” said Mendel. “You lie down to sleep, I'll sit beside you. You slept in the corner, in Zuchnow, next to the stove.” “I remember clearly one day,” began Menuchim, taking off his glasses, and Mendel saw the naked eyes of his son, they seemed to him sad and weary, “I remember a morning, the sun is very bright, the room empty. Then you come, lift me up, I sit on a table, and you ring a glass with a spoon. It was a wonderful ring, I wish I could compose and play it today. Then you sing. Then the clocks begin to toll, very old ones, like great heavy spoons they strike gigantic glasses.” “Go on, go on,” said Mendel. He too remembered clearly that day, on which Deborah left the house to prepare for the journey to Kapturak. “That's the only thing from the early days!” said his son. “Then comes the time when Billes's son-in-law, the violinist, plays. Every day, I believe, he plays. He stops playing, but I always hear him, all day long, all night long.” “Go on, go on!” urged Mendel, in the tone in which he always encouraged his pupils to study.

“Then there's nothing for a long time! Then one day I see a great red and blue fire. I lie down on the floor. I crawl to the door. Suddenly someone pulls me up and pushes me, I run. I'm outside, people are standing on the other side of the street. Fire! The cry bursts from me!” “Go on, go on!” urged Mendel. “I remember
nothing else. They told me later that I was sick and unconscious for a long time. I remember only the times in Petersburg, a white hall, white beds, many children in the beds, a harmonium or an organ is playing, and I sing along with a loud voice. Then the doctor takes me home in a car. A tall blond woman in a pale blue dress is playing piano. She stands up. I go to the keys, there's a sound when I touch them. Suddenly I play the songs of the organ and everything I can sing.” “Go on, go on!” urged Mendel. “I can think of nothing else that would matter more to me than those few days. I remember my mother. It was warm and soft with her, I believe she had a very deep voice, and her face was very big and round, like a whole world.” “Go on, go on!” said Mendel. “Miriam, Jonas, Shemariah I don't remember. I heard about them only much later, from Billes's daughter.”

Mendel sighed. “Miriam,” he repeated. She stood before him, in her golden-yellow shawl, with her blue-black hair, nimble and light-footed, a young gazelle. She had his eyes. “I was a bad father,” said Mendel. “I treated you badly, and her too. Now she is lost, no medicine can help her.” “We will go to her,” said Menuchim. “I myself, Father, have I not been healed?”

Yes, Menuchim was right. Man is unsatisfied, Mendel said to himself. He has just experienced a miracle, already he wants to see the next. Wait, wait, Mendel Singer! Just look what has become of Menuchim, the cripple. Slender are his hands, wise are his eyes, soft are his cheeks.

“Go to sleep, Father!” said his son. He sat down on the floor
and pulled off Mendel Singer's old boots. He gazed at the soles, which were torn, had jagged edges, the yellow patched uppers, the roughened shafts, the hole-riddled socks, the frayed pants. He undressed the old man and laid him in bed. Then he left the room, took a book from his suitcase, returned to his father, sat down in the rocking chair next to the bed, lit the small green lamp and began to read. Mendel pretended to sleep. He squinted through a narrow crack between his eyelids. His son laid the book aside and said: “You are thinking of Miriam, Father! We will visit her. I will call doctors. They will cure her. She is still young! Go to sleep!” Mendel closed his eyes, but he didn't fall asleep. He thought of Miriam, heard the unfamiliar noises of the world, felt through his closed eyelids the nocturnal flames of the bright sky. He didn't sleep, but he felt at ease, he rested. With his wakeful head he lay bedded in sleep and waited for the morning.

His son prepared him a bath, dressed him, sat him in the car. They drove for a long time through noisy streets, they left the city, they came to a long and wide road, on the sides of which stood budding trees. The engine emitted a high-pitched hum, in the wind Mendel's beard waved. He was silent. “Do you want to know where we're going, Father?” asked his son. “No!” answered Mendel. “I don't want to know anything! Wherever you go is good.”

And they reached a world where the soft sand was yellow, the wide sea blue and all the houses white. On the terrace in front of one of those houses, at a small white table, sat Mendel Singer. He slurped a golden-brown tea. On his stooped back shone the first
warm sun of the year. The blackbirds hopped up close to him. Their sisters were fluting in front of the terrace. The waves of the sea lapped the shore with a gentle regular beat. In the pale blue sky were a few little white clouds. Under that sky Mendel was willing to believe that Jonas would one day turn up again and Miriam come home, “in all the land were no women found so fair,” he quoted inwardly. He himself, Mendel Singer, will, after late years, have a good death, surrounded by many grandchildren and “old and full of days,” as it was written in “Job.” He felt a strange and also forbidden longing to take off the cap of old silk rep and let the sun shine on his old pate. And for the first time in his life Mendel Singer voluntarily uncovered his head, as he had done only in an office or in the bath. The sparse, curly little hairs on his bald head were moved by a spring wind, as if they were strange delicate plants.

Thus Mendel Singer greeted the world.

And a gull flew, like a silver bullet of the sky, under the canopy of the terrace. Mendel watched its precipitous flight and the shadowy white trail that it left behind in the blue air.

Then the son said:

“Next week I'm going to San Francisco. On the way back we're playing ten days in Chicago. I think, Father, that we can go to Europe in four weeks!”

“Miriam?”

“Today I will see her, talk to doctors. Everything will be fine,
Father. Maybe we will take her with us. Maybe she will recover in Europe!”

They returned to the hotel. Mendel went into his son's room. He was tired. “Lie down on the sofa, sleep a little,” said his son. “In two hours I'll be back!”

Mendel lay down obediently. He knew where his son was going. He was going to his sister. He was a wonderful man, the blessing rested on him, he would make Miriam healthy.

Mendel glimpsed a large photograph in a reddish-brown frame on the small dressing table. “Give me the picture!” he implored.

He gazed at it for a long time. He saw the young blond woman in a bright dress, bright as the day, she sat in a garden, through which the wind meandered and moved the bushes at the edges of the flowerbeds. Two children, a girl and a boy, stood next to a small wagon with a donkey harnessed to it, as are used in some gardens as a vehicle for play.

“God bless them!” said Mendel.

The son left. The father remained on the sofa, he laid the photograph gently beside him. His weary eyes wandered through the room to the window. From his deep sofa he could see a jagged cloudless piece of sky. He picked up the picture again. There was his daughter-in-law, Menuchim's wife, there were his grandchildren, Menuchim's children. When he looked at the girl more closely, he thought he saw a childhood picture of Deborah. Dead was Deborah, with strange, otherworldly eyes she perhaps witnessed
the miracle. Gratefully Mendel remembered her young warmth, which he had once tasted, her red cheeks, her half-open eyes, which had shone in the dark nights of love, narrow enticing lights. Dead Deborah!

He stood up, pushed a chair to the sofa, placed the picture on the chair and lay down again. As they slowly closed, his eyes took the whole blue brightness of the sky into sleep and the faces of the new children. Beside them emerged from the portrait's brown background Jonas and Miriam. Mendel fell asleep. And he rested from the weight of happiness and the greatness of miracles.

 

 

Translator's Afterword

“I've seen a few worlds perish,” laments Mendel Singer, the protagonist of Joseph Roth's 1930 novel
Job: The Story of a Simple Man,
in the course of a life afflicted by one misfortune after another. So too had his creator. Born in 1894 in Brody, a small, mostly Jewish town in Galicia – a province at the easternmost edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, six miles from the Russian border – Roth witnessed the disappearance of his homeland from the map with the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918. This experience of irretrievable loss through historic upheaval profoundly shaped his fiction, essays and journalism. Above all, his twin masterpieces –
Job,
the tale of an uprooted Russian Jew, and
The Radetzsky March
(1932), a generational novel that traces Austria-Hungary's demise – convey the fundamental homesickness at the heart of the author's life and work.

When Roth first left home in 1913 for the University of Lemberg, from which he transferred the following year to the University of Vienna, he was not eager to identify with his origins. Indeed, as a student in the Austrian capital – where there was widespread contempt for
Ostjuden,
as Eastern European Jews were disparagingly called, and Galicia was considered a particularly backward region – he sought to disguise his background
through false biographical claims and affectations. He named Schwabendorf, a predominantly German town, as his birthplace, and variously described his father – who in reality had been placed in care for madness before Joseph was born – as a Viennese factory owner, an army officer, a Polish aristocrat, and other imaginary figures. In 1916 Roth abandoned his German literature studies to volunteer for military service in the First World War. Upon entering the anti-Semitic atmosphere of the Austrian Army, he shed his former first name, Moses (Joseph had been his middle name).

The fall of the empire at the end of the war became the pivotal event of Roth's life. His novels of the early 1920s are
Heimkehrerromane,
stories about returning soldiers. They testify to the shock of his own unattainable homecoming. Like the writer himself, Roth's soldiers invariably discover that, in the radically transformed postwar landscape, they no longer have homes to come back to. Though he moved to Berlin in 1923 with his new wife – Friederike Reichler, the daughter of Galician-Jewish parents – Roth went on to lead a restless, itinerant existence as a journalist for Austrian and German newspapers, usually of a liberal or leftist bent. As a foreign correspondent, he reported from a variety of places, including Russia, Poland, Albania, Italy and France. His was the life of a stateless nomad, shuttling among the hotels, cafés and taverns of Europe's cities and provinces. Fittingly for a man of the press, his debut as a novelist in 1923,
The Spider's Web
– which presciently diagnosed the threat of the fascist right – was published as a newspaper serial.