Now Friedrich himself wrote reports for registers. And all the acrobatics with which he had assumed and discarded names, disguised and simulated existences, had only led him to become himself a tool, an object of the offices and bureaux. Would the paperwork never cease? What kind of decree was it that conferred on the most fragile and delicate of materials — paper, pencil and pen — power over blood and iron, brains and brawn, fire and water, hunger and epidemic? Only a moment ago the thousand chancelleries had been burnt down. He himself had set fire to them. He himself had seen their crumbling ashes. And already they were writing again in a hundred thousand chancelleries, and already there were new small books with green and red lines, and already every man had a code-number in an office as small children have a guardian angel in heaven. ‘I will not!’ cried Friedrich. ‘I will not!’ he thought, while he himself sat in an office and dictated to a girl in a blue sailor’s costume. How nimbly the pen ran with her hand! It was a Koh-i-noor, shiny yellow with a long black tip. Then the girl went into the big general office and the machine began to clatter. And the report found itself in the courier’s briefcase. He entered a secretariat. There sat Dr M., a small plump man with a face which seemed to consist of nothing but protuberances, and tiny malevolent eyes under a brow full of meaningless furrows, the consequences of a mood of the skin and not of careful thought. He hated Friedrich. He wanted to be abroad writing reports himself. Just as the front-rank party chiefs did not desire to go abroad, but endeavoured to remain in Moscow at any price, so the mediocre subordinates desired nothing more ardently than a sojourn in a bourgeois foreign country where they could live out their bourgeois tendencies. They wanted to drink good beer, to sit at a well-laid table. Was that not what one meant by the cause of the proletariat?
But what was the cause of the proletariat? These deputies, who let themselves be imprisoned and were set free again, these anonymous proletarians who were forgotten in the penitentiaries, the shot and the hanged, what use were they? How did it come about that the very ones who were attempting to construct a new world behaved according to the oldest superstition, the oldest, most absurd superstition of the profit and sanctity of sacrifice? Was it not the Fatherland that demanded sacrifice? Was it not religion that demanded sacrifice? Alas, the Revolution too demanded it! And it drove men to the altars, and everyone who submitted himself to sacrifice died in the conviction that he died for something great. And meanwhile it was the living who came off best! The world had grown old, blood was a familiar sight, death a trivial matter. All died to no purpose and were forgotten a year later. Only romanticism, like paper, was immortal.
‘I serve without belief,’ Friedrich told himself. ‘Twenty years ago it would have been called villainy. I draw my salary without convictions. I despise the men with whom I associate, I do not believe in the success of this Revolution. Between the lines of the brazen materialistic statutes that govern at least the civilized part of the world, on the other hand, there are still unknown, unreadable secrets.’
He stood there like a captain whose ship has sunk and who, contrary to duty and against his will, remains alive thanks to a malicious fate: preserved for life on earth, on an alien planet.
5
Friedrich fell ill.
He lay alone in his room, in fever’s soft delirium, and cosseted by solitude for the first time. Till now he had known only its cruel constancy and its obstinate muteness. Now he recognized its gentle friendship and caught the quiet melody of its voice. No friend, no loved one and no comrade. Only thoughts came, like children, simultaneously begotten, born and grown. For the first time in his life he learned to know illness, the beneficent pressure of soft hands, the wonderful deceptive feeling of being able to get up but unwilling to rise, the capacity to lie and float suspended at the same time, the strength that comes from loneliness like grace from misfortune, and the mute colloquy with the wide grey sky that filled the window of his high-up room, the only guest from the outside world. ‘When others are ill,’ he thought, ‘a friend comes, asks if he may smoke a cigarette, gives the patient his hand, which it then occurs to him to wash — on hygienic grounds. The sweetheart deploys her maternal instinct, proves to herself that she can love, makes a small flirtatious sacrifice, overcomes her reluctance to take hold of ugly objects with a delicate hand. The comrades come with optimistic bustle, bringing the tenor of events to the bedside in forced witty disguise, laugh too loudly and smile indulgently and obtain an assurance of their own health, just as the charitable involuntarily feel in their own pockets to check their spare change at the sight of a beggar. Only I am alone. Berzejev has stayed in Russia. He has a fatherland. I have none. It is possible that in a hundred or two hundred years time no human being in the world will have a place they can call home or asylum. The earth will look the same everywhere, like a sea, and just as a sailor is at home wherever there is the sound of water, so everyone will be at home wherever grass grows, or rock or sand. I was born too late or too early. I am one of the experiments that Nature makes here and there before she decides to bring forth a new species. When my fever wanes I shall get up and go away. I shall literally fulfil my fate to be a stranger. I shall prolong the mild abandonment of the fever a little, and wandering will transform my solitude into good fortune, as the illness has almost done.’
His fever waned. He got up. Because he had known no childhood and no mother, and because he had grown up without hearing the names of diseases and discussions as to their causes, he was not even curious to know what had been wrong with him. But he had to specify a disease to obtain his leave. He allowed himself to be told what people called the condition he had suffered from. He took six months’ leave. ‘I am now committing what is known as a shabby trick,’ he told himself. ‘According to the moral attitudes of this stupid world, it is bad enough to work for a cause of which one is not as convinced as the majority of stewards of that cause. But it’s even worse to break off from this sort of work and take money for it. Both bourgeois society and its revolutionary opponents have the same appropriate term for a character such as myself. They call such behaviour cynical. Cynicism is never permitted to the individual. Only countries, parties and guardians of the future may make use of it. For the individual there is nothing left but to show his true colours. I am a cynic.’
He therefore supplied himself with money and — as so many times in his life — with a passport in a false name. The Revolution had become legitimized by diplomatic subterfuge. A false passport no longer gave Friedrich any pleasure. Even a reactionary police force acknowledged the pseudonym of a revolutionary like the incognito of a Balkan prince. Only the newspapers, which were paid by fearful industrialists, sometimes thought they were giving the government of their country a piece of information when they reported that this or that dangerous emissary of the revolution had arrived under a false name. In reality, it was the government who strove to conceal the dangerous man from the newspapers. The times were past when Friedrich had conceived himself as waging a personal battle against the world order and its defenders by means of hazardous stratagems and superfluous dissembling. Now he possessed an unwritten but internationally recognized right to illegality.