Rebellion by Joseph Roth

Author:Joseph Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

9

ANDREAS PUM’S MISFORTUNE had benefited someone else, too, namely Herr Arnold. His rage had evaporated. He tried to forget the disagreeable Luigi Bernotat. He would go and see his lawyer tomorrow. He kissed his wife and his two blooming children. He had more kind words for the maid. And, even though there was a certain severity in his manner, his words and his gestures, those around him did breathe a little more easily. He cast a friendly shadow on his family.

Meanwhile, Andreas Pum went to his shelter. There stood his Mooli, radiating warmth. A bat was hibernating in a nook between two posts. The damp straw stank, and near the door it was actually frozen. The wind blew through the hinges. Through a crack, Andreas could see a few stars in the winter night. He fiddled with a straw. Then he twisted a ring out of three straws and set it on Mooli’s ear. It was a friendly animal that liked being stroked. Slowly and tenderly it raised a rear hoof, and it looked as though it were trying in its clumsy way to stroke Andreas. There was enough light to see its eyes. They were big in the dark and amber-yellow. They were damp, as though filled with sadness, but still reluctant to cry.

The more the night advanced, the colder it became. Andreas felt like whimpering, but he felt too ashamed to do so in front of the animal. His missing leg hurt him again, for the first time in a long time. He unbuckled his leg, and felt his stump. It had the shape of a flattened cone. The flesh was crisscrossed with faint cracks and hollows. When Andreas put his hand on it, the pain eased. But the other pain in his heart was unappeasable.

It was a still, bright night. Dogs barked. Doors banged in the dark. The snow creaked, even with no one walking about on it, merely because of the wind. The world outside seemed to be expanding. He could see only a tiny scrap of sky through a chink. But it was enough to give a clear taste of infinity.

Did God live beyond the stars? Could He bear to watch a man’s misery and not intervene? What went on behind that icy blue? Was the world ruled by a tyrant, whose injustice was as boundless as the heavens themselves?

Why does He punish us with His sudden disfavor? We’ve done nothing wrong, we’ve not even sinned in our thoughts. Quite the opposite: we were always pious and devoted to Him, though we didn’t know Him, and if our lips didn’t praise Him every single day, we still lived contentedly, and without wicked resentments in our breast, modest links in the chain of the world, as He created it. Did we give Him occasion to avenge Himself on us? To change the world so much that everything that seemed good to us about it, suddenly turned bad? Or did He perhaps know of a secret sin

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