Here is the novel that most closely resembles Roth’s own marriage. His true masterpiece, that small book he wrote later in his short life, knowing how little time was left to him as a writer on the run from the Nazis. Das falsche Gewicht. Weights and Measures. The story of a government official sent to a small town on the Russian border to take charge of verifying the people’s honesty. The town, not unlike my author’s own birthplace of Brody, thrives on falsehood and corruption at a time when the empire is coming to an end and the new era of nationalism approaches. Eibenschütz is an isolated man, despised by the rest of the community, fighting a lonely battle to uphold standards of truth in a world where order has begun to fall apart around him.
When he discovers that his own wife is being unfaithful to him, his life descends into chaos. She gives birth to a baby boy and pretends it belongs to him. Devastated by this betrayal, he then falls in love with a young Gypsy woman at one of the most notorious smuggling bars. He begins to drink heavily and finds himself joining in with the community, entering into the life of falsehood he has been sent to clean up. Loose and free as any chestnut roaster travelling across borders with his dog and cart.
An epidemic begins to sweep through the country.
He receives a letter informing him that his son is dead and his wife is dying. He goes to visit her and finds her in bed in the care of a nun. She stretches out her arms to say that she has always loved him – do I need to die? He wants to do something kind for her, play some music, perhaps, in her dying moments. He paces up and down in the room, listening to the sound of her body shuddering in the bed. He looks out at the murky rain falling and horse-drawn trucks passing the house, driven by men wearing black hoods, laden with bodies on their way to a communal grave. The hospitals are overcrowded and people are left to die at home. A single candle stands lit on a round table, like the only sign of goodness left in the room. His wife reaches out to him with a searing cry as she dies. He moves towards her, wishing to hold her hand at least, but the nun tells him to stand back. He breaks down sobbing and takes out the bottle from his pocket.
And what about Rebellion?
Yanis brought the book club back on track.
For him, the man with the barrel organ was the perfect example of the person on the periphery. His happiness is brought to an end by a racist.
You think it’s an allegory for racism? Renate asked.
It’s the story of the outsider, Yanis said. The newcomer on our streets. Downgraded to cleaning up after other men in the toilets of a restaurant.
As a book, Yanis continued, I found myself comparing it to Ulysses. James Joyce published his masterpiece around the same time, by the way, just two years earlier. The story of Leopold Bloom wandering through the city of Dublin. The outcast. The cuckold. The Jew. Betrayed by his wife, who sleeps with another man while he spends the day out walking the streets. Bloom has become displaced. His country is imaginary. He returns late at night when she is already asleep. He picks up her underwear, and maybe then, holding these fantasy garments up to his face, he realizes that this is as close as he will ever get to home.
I’m not a literary scientist, Yanis said, but I believe James Joyce and Joseph Roth both struck the same model found in ancient Greek literature to describe the stranger. The solitary traveller.
The unrecognized.
They stood up and began putting the furniture back in place.
Leave it, Julia said.
But they all felt the need to bring things back to the starting point. They continued tidying up, covering the remaining food, bringing used plates out to the small kitchen. They folded the tablecloths and stacked the tables away. Small conversations broke out around the room as they carried the chairs over to where they normally were, in a cluster around the coffee table by the reception area. The book club journal was left on the desk for everyone to put in their own rating.
Jürgen began leafing through my pages and came to the map at the back. Lena explained to him how it had been drawn in by the original owner of the book, a place somewhere in the East, close to the Polish border, she believed.
He told Lena that he and his wife, Zeta, had been out there recently looking for a house to buy. Call it nostalgia, he said, something in that landscape I can’t let go. Somewhere to escape to. Zeta says we would have a rule – no phones, no devices, we would just walk and make meals and talk and be alive.
Sounds good to me, Lena said.
We found a nice house in the heart of a nature reserve, Jürgen said. It was funny, the estate agent insisted on showing us the basement. It was damp. We got the smell of mildew. There was nothing to see apart from a couple of shelves with pickle jars. The estate agent kept pointing out how much space there was. During the war, there were twenty-three people sheltered down there. They all survived in the end. They even went without being detected when the Russians arrived. It was the safest place in the whole of Germany.
The agent spoke about the basement as a unique selling point. The basement is where you will take shelter from whatever the world will throw at you. You never know what’s coming down the line, the agent said. Disease, hunger, migrants, the climate. You will be safe, she said. You will never run out of water. Space to store food. Look at the metal doors, you would have no trouble with marauders. Away from the floods. And the summers, the heat, the estate agent said, the world will be burning up and you will all be nice and cool down here.
Are you going to buy it? Lena asked.
We have bought it.