He took leave of Friedrich, Hilde accompanied him. They decided to meet again in an hour.
During this hour Friedrich walked up and down in front of the hotel, just as he would have done ten years before. ‘Everything’s alive again!’ he thought. ‘Nothing has happened between the day I first saw her in the carriage and today. I am young and happy. Shall I yet believe in the miracle of love? It is obviously a miracle when what has happened is obliterated.’
And then he said to Hilde: ‘Once, during my escape from Siberia, I thought of taking you with me to a remote and peaceful country. There are still peaceful foreign countries. Let us be on our way.’
‘We do not need them in order to be happy.’
They walked through broad unlighted streets, across animated squares, avoided dangers unthinkingly, only by means of the waxing instinct to remain alive and to live. They would have succeeded in saving themselves from a catastrophe, among a thousand who perished they would have been the only survivors.
He was spared none of the follies with which masculine infatuation is so well endowed. Jealousy possessed him, not so much against particular men but a jealousy for the whole of the long period that Hilde had passed without him. And he even finally asked that most stupid and masculine of all the questions contained in the lexicon of love: ‘Why didn’t you wait for me?’ And he received the inevitable reply, which any other woman would have given, and which is far from a logical answer but rather a continuation of this question: ‘I have never loved anyone but you!’
And so love began to lead him from an abnormal to a normal existence, and he got to know its mortal and yet eternal delights and, for the first time in his life, the happiness that consists in giving up great goals in favour of small ones and of overestimating the attainable so extravagantly that there is nothing more to seek. They travelled through white cities, stood in great harbours, saw ships sail for foreign shores, met trains that sped into the unknown, and could never catch sight of a ship or a train without envisaging themselves travelling off into the distance, the future, the void. They anxiously counted the days they could still remain together, and the fewer they became the richer and more full of improbable happenings the remainder seemed to be. If the first week had been an indivisible unit of time, the second already split into days, the third into hours, and in the fourth, in which they began to savour every moment as an entire rich day, they regretted having allowed the first to pass so prodigally.
‘I shall follow you everywhere,’ said Hilde, ‘even to Siberia!’
‘Why should I go there? I no longer intend to place myself in dangerous situations.’
‘What else do you want to do then?’
‘Nothing at all.’
Hilde fell into a deep and disappointed silence. It was the first time that they had suddenly arrived at a point where they ceased to understand each other. These moments recurred more and more often, only they forgot them over again. Both delayed explanations for more favourable opportunities. But such opportunities generally failed to arrive and the silent hours became increasingly common. There were tendernesses that Friedrich did not reciprocate. Words fell from the lips of each without an echo, like stones into a bottomless abyss.
Once she said, perhaps to propitiate him: ‘I admire you, for all that.’ And he could not restrain himself from replying: ‘Whom haven’t you admired before now? A painter, a gifted author, the war, the wounded. Now you’re admiring a revolutionary.’
‘One gets more clever,’ she replied.
‘One gets more stupid,’ he said.
And there began a rapid to-and-fro of empty meaningless words, a battle with empty nutshells.
‘She has to have someone to admire,’ thought Friedrich. ‘At the moment, I am her hero. Too late, too late. She turns to me at a moment when I am beginning to disown myself. I am no longer my old self, I merely continue to play the part — out of chivalry.’
However, it was settled between them that Hilde would leave her husband and children.
‘Don’t forget,’ she said as she got on the train, ‘that I shall follow you everywhere. …’ ‘Even to Siberia,’ she added as the train began to gather speed.
He could no longer answer.
She was due to join him a week later.
8
Actually, the story of our contemporary, Friedrich Kargan, might have come to a satisfactory ending here, if by that one understands the final homecoming to a loved woman and the prospect of a kind of domestic happiness that offers itself in the last pages of a book. But Friedrich’s peculiar destiny, or the inconstancy of his nature with which we have become acquainted in the present account, resisted so gentle an exit from a stormy existence. Some weeks ago we were startled by the news that he and some members of the so-called ‘opposition’ who, as is generally known, had declared an open resistance to the ruling régime in Russia, had gone to Siberia for a long spell. What occasioned him to suffer once again for a cause of which he was clearly no longer convinced? On the basis of what little we can deduce from the most recent events in his life, we can only surmise and conjecture as follows.
After he had left Hilde, he found a communication from his friend Berzejev. ‘I am not sorry,’ wrote the latter, ‘that I did not follow you abroad, but I regret that I shall presumably never see you again. Call it the sentimentality of a clearly anarchistically disposed man, which no longer embarrasses me now that I have been publicly stripped of the rank of a revolutionary. To console you, let me say that I go into exile compulsorily and yet willingly. If Savelli only suspected how he is actually satisfying my secret yearning, he would probably assign me to a perpetual couriership between Moscow and Berlin as a punishment; I mean to the post of an upholder of culture, a herald of the electrification of the proletariat, its transformation into an efficient middle class. For men like us, Siberia is the only possible abode.’
The same kind of yearning for the edge of the world could equally well have been expressed by Friedrich. Whether one changes the direction of one’s life or not does not seem to depend on a voluntary decision. The bliss of having once suffered for a great ideal and for humanity governs our decisions, even after doubt has long made us clearsighted, knowledgeable and without hope. One has gone through the fire and remains marked for the rest of one’s life. Perhaps, too, the woman entered Friedrich’s life too late. Perhaps his old friend meant more to him than she did.
The old friend — and the same bitterness which nurtured this friendship today, as formerly the same idealism had done. Did they not both walk about with the proud grief of silent prophets, did they not both record in their invisible writing the symptoms of an inhuman and technically accomplished future, whose emblems are the aeroplane and the football and not the hammer and sickle? ‘Compulsorily and yet willingly’ — as Berzejev wrote — others too made their way to Siberia.
9
That is possibly why Friedrich obeyed the order to come to Moscow. He stood in Savelli’s office. It was situated in the often described and, one may say, most feared building in Moscow. A light bare room. The customary portraits of Marx and Lenin were absent from the light-yellow walls. There were three wide comfortable leather chairs, two in front of the large desk and one behind it. Savelli occupied the latter, back to the window, face turned to the door. On the shining plate-glass over the desk there lay nothing but a single blank yellow octavo sheet. The glass reflected the dim sky admitted by the window. It was somewhat surprising, in this cold room which seemed still to be waiting for its furnishings, in which however Savelli had lived for over two years, to tread on a thick soft red carpet that was intended to absorb not only the sound of footsteps but all sound of any kind. Savelli still looked as he did on the morning when he had crossed the frontier. As R. had said of him, he had changed as little as a principle.