The Silent Prophet Read Online Free Page A

The Silent Prophet
Book: The Silent Prophet Read Online Free
Author: Joseph Roth
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can get work for you too. Willingly! I'd be glad to do so. Is your handwriting good? Come tomorrow!'
    They went to a linen warehouse. The book-keeper handed them a list and a hundred and fifty green envelopes.
    'Where are you eating tonight?' asked Grünhut. 'Come with me.'
    They ate in a cellar. They were given soup made of sausage scraps. A long table. Hurrying rattling spoons. Metal tableware. Noises of lips smacking, spoons scraping, throats gurgling. 'Good soup!' said Grünhut. 'I'll show you about the coffee, we have that across the road, at Grüner's. Soon you won't have to bother any more, you'll be eating in the college refectory. I used to feed there once.'
    'I could find myself in the same situation,' said Friedrich.
    'What, really? What situation? My situation, of course! Do you really think so? Yes, it's a good thing that I've shown you all these places. I had to discover them myself.'
    'Thank you.'
    'Oh, not at all! Not at all! When I came out of prison, I was all alone. Wife divorced! Brother a stranger. Didn't know me anymore. Apart from Frau Tarka, I didn't know a soul. Her brother was in clink with me. So he recommended me. Connections are what count in our circles too. Do you know Frau Tarka? She's the midwife, just over your tailor's. My room's above yours. I checked. You wouldn't believe how many come to Frau Tarka. Yesterday, for example, Dr D.'s daughter. Six months ago it was the wife of a proper Excellency. And the young men! Sons of public prosecutors and generals! Bring their careless little girls. And all I did was to undo the blouse of the pupil I was teaching geography and history in the sixth form, at the high school in the Floriangasse, a private school. Good children from good homes. A working man's daughter wouldn't have said anything. But the well-off! I know a lawyer who raped his ward. A lieutenant who sleeps with his batman. I could write them each a little anonymous letter if I were a scoundrel. But I'm not, in spite of everything. Where do you stand politically? Left, of course! What? I've no opinions. But I think a revolution would do us good. A small short revolution. Three days, for instance.'
    A peculiar relationship developed between Friedrich and myself at that time. I might call it intimacy without friendship or comradeship without affection. And even the fellow-feeling which later linked us was not present at the outset. It arose from the attention we began to pay each other one day and from the mutual mistrust we detected in each other. Finally we began to respect each other. Trust grew slowly, was fostered by the glances we exchanged, almost without realizing it, in the company of others and less by the words that passed than by the silences in which we often sat and strolled together. Had our lives not taken such differing courses, Friedrich would probably have become my friend, as did Franz Tunda.
    It was a long time before Friedrich decided to look up Savelli, who was still living in Vienna at that time. He was afraid. He felt that, for the time being, he still had the choice between what he termed 'revolutionary asceticism' and the 'world', the vague romantic notion of pleasures, struggles, triumphs. Already he hated the governance of this world, but he still believed in it.
    The finely soaring ramp of the University did not yet seem to him—as it did to me—the fortress wall of the national students' association, from which every few weeks Jews or Czechs were flung down, but as a kind of ascent to 'Knowledge and Power'. He had the respect of the self-taught for books, which is even greater than that contempt for books which distinguishes the wise. When he leafed through a catalogue, stood in front of the bookshop windows, sat in the quiet mildly dusty rooms of the library, regarded the dark-green backs of innumerable books on the tall wide shelves, the military ranks of green lampshades on the long tables, the deep devotion which makes every reader in the library look
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