There is a photo of my author as a small boy, looking like a girl. Joseph Roth with dropping blond curls and a round hat on top of his head, a four-year-old cavalryman sitting on a wooden horse holding a stick.
He came from a place in the East where the Austro-Hungarian cavalry frequently rode through his town. A place called Brody, close to the Russian border. He kept the sound of hoofs in his head. His childhood landscape was like a Chagall painting, with fiddle players and weddings in the sky. Old Jewish men with beards and black coats. Men selling roasted chestnuts on the corner. The moon looked in the window at night and laid snow out on the roofs. A cold hand on his mouth as he went to school. The window frames shrank and swelled with the seasons, letting in the heat in summer and the ice in winter. The lives of people living indoors was not unlike the lives of people on the move. They boiled potatoes in the fields every autumn and ate strawberries with mud on them in spring.
Juice and mud, exploding in his memory.
In his own words, he grew up with the Gypsies of the Hungarian Puszta, the sub-Carpathian Hutsuls, the Jewish cab drivers of Galicia, the Slovenian chestnut roasters from Šipolje, the Swabian tobacco growers from Bačka, the horse breeders of the steppe, the Ottoman Siberians, the traders from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Hanakian horse dealers from Moravia, the weavers of the Ore Mountains, the millers and the coral sellers of Podolia.
An unusual child?
The only son of a single mother. Not much of an athlete, more bookish. He kept pet spiders in his room and fed them flies. Going to sleep, he imitated the sound of hoofs. His fingers were covered in ink. His handwriting was tiny, like needlepoint. At school he got the better of his classmates by copying out an entire poem by Schiller on the back of a postage stamp. He told them his father was good with horses. Fabrication became necessity. He needed a story to go out the door with and so he became the boy novelist who told them his father was a horseman, a cab driver, a Polish officer, a drunkard, a thief, a vagrant, a madman.
Seventeen different versions, they counted.
The truth was that he never met his father. Maybe that’s what happens to all men, he must have thought growing up: they fall in love and go insane. After love there is nothing but fatal illness and death. The loss of his father would become a hidden story, stitched into his characters, writing as his own form of love-madness.
His mother sang sad Ukrainian songs. Dependent on the help of relatives, she pinned her hopes on this gifted child and loved him like an overheated room. A son to compensate for lost dreams. She kept him to herself inside the parameters of a legend, never allowing anyone to come and visit. He loved walking along the wall by the graveyard, looking at the tombstones, but she wanted him to stay at home.
My author has her in his books – a mother who conceals her scheming in tiny complaints about jam. Crystals of sugar starting to form over winter storage. She begins a curse that she cannot allow herself to finish. Her sorrow spreads in hardened glucose across the bread in the morning. Rooms with withered violets and sputtering candles. The manure of horses in the street. Pedlars coming to the door with rain in their coats. A landscape of brown leaves that turns to snow and mush and spring again. Time to go searching for strawberries, even though the foresters will chase the women away and overturn their baskets and stamp the gathered fruit of the empire with their boots. But the forests are so full of strawberries that nobody can stop fresh jam appearing on the table.
A mother who wears a monocle hanging from her waist and puts it up to her eye in silent accusation, giving her access to his boyhood desires. His thoughts of escaping on the back of one of those cavalry horses off to some distant fringe of the empire. She drops the monocle as though she has seen something unspeakable in his thoughts that cannot be put into words.
A mother who inhales and sighs.
A mother who sits down at the piano to play Chopin. Her face lights up like a young girl’s in the candlelight, but when her kind white hands hit the keys, there is no music. The piano remains silent. He raises the lid to look inside and finds the strings have been removed.
A mother who wants to possess her son like a cashbox and thinks all other women are thieves trying to steal him from her. She will never give her consent for him to love another. He will say that his mother was the only source of happiness he ever knew, but still he runs away to Vienna. He volunteers and goes to war.
He witnesses the body parts of men distributed around the fields. He comes back to report on the half-men, the men who only partially return, still wearing their military overcoats for warmth, a brigade of beggars and street musicians that look like bits of fog moving through the city.
Everywhere, that asthmatic whine of the barrel organ.
And Friederike.
He meets her in a café in Vienna. She’s eighteen. She’s with a friend. After an exchange of jokes, he runs out into the street after her to get her name – Friederike Reichel. Her laughter is infectious. Her dark hair is cut short, dropping in a straight fringe across her forehead. Her eyes are full of provocation. She has already promised herself to another man, but that will not stop her changing her mind.
She’s afraid to tell him that she is Jewish, in case he might not like her. He tells her nothing about being Jewish either, until he finally meets her parents, then he calls them his mother and father.
He goes to see his own mother, dying of cancer in a Viennese hospital. Surgeons have removed her uterus and she is in extreme pain, but she notices that his shirt is torn and gets up to mend it. She wants him to look right. When she’s finished, she climbs back into bed and dies. Once her body is taken away for burial, he learns that the medical staff have kept her uterus for examination, so he wants to see it with his own eyes. He stands there saying goodbye to his mother’s womb in a kidney-shaped dish.
His Jewish place of origin, with lovers flying over the rooftops and strawberries bursting with mud and potato fires burning in the sky and the roast chestnut vendor arriving in town with his dog-drawn cart.
They will call him a perpetual traveller. His letters reveal how frequently he can cross the city like a bird. He avoids public transport and prefers to walk so he can talk to people in the street as if the world is full of relatives. He is more at home in hotel rooms now, with a small suitcase by the door containing the most essential things – some clothes, cravats, a notepad and a dozen sharpened pencils.
He loves Friederike like no other.
Frieda.
Friedl.
There is little time left. They must live urgently. A quiet Jewish wedding – Joseph and Frieda – in happiness beyond imagining. He takes her to Berlin. They stay in hotels and eat out in restaurants, like a honeymoon for eternity. She accompanies him on assignments. Sometimes he leaves her alone in her room and comes back late. There is something fragile about her health that is like a forecast of the time they live in. Like some unknown illness spreading through the streets.
In a letter to his cousin, she writes to say that she’s been having some trouble with her arm. My arm got very bad, she writes, and hurt a lot. The swelling has begun to go down at last. She still has a cough and takes a hot bath, aspirin, gets into bed to sweat it off. She’s worried about him. He’s gone out to the theatre. It’s already twelve midnight, she writes, and he’s not back yet – what do you think of that, shocking!