The Legend of the Holy Drinker by Joseph Roth

Author:Joseph Roth [Roth, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

7

While he was standing at the bar, he noticed a framed drawing on the wall, behind the broad back of his host, and the drawing reminded him of an old school friend at Olschowice. He asked the patron: ‘Who is that? I have a feeling I know him.’ Thereupon the patron and the other customers standing at the bar all burst out laughing. ‘What!’ they shouted to one another. ‘He doesn’t know who that is!’

Because, of course, as any normal person would have known, it was Kanjak, the great footballer from Silesia. But then how could a man who slept under bridges, an alcoholic like our Andreas, have known that? Feeling ashamed of himself anyway, particularly because he had just had his one-thousand-franc note changed, Andreas muttered: ‘Of course I know him, he even happens to be a friend of mine. It’s just not a terribly good likeness.’ And, to avoid any further questions, he quickly paid and left.

Now, though, he was genuinely hungry. He made for the nearest restaurant, ate and drank red wine with his meal, had cheese and then coffee, and thought he would spend the afternoon at the cinema. Only he wasn’t quite sure which one to go to. But knowing that he had as much money on him at that moment as any of the prosperous types passing him on the pavement, he headed for the great boulevards. Between the Opéra and the Boulevard des Capucines he looked for a film he might enjoy, and finally he found one. The poster advertising the film showed a man obviously bent on meeting his death in some far-distant adventure. It described him crawling through the desert under the searing rays of an implacable sun. That was the film for Andreas. He sat in the cinema, watching the man crossing the scorching desert. Andreas was just on the point of finding the hero an admirable character, and identifying with him, when the film abruptly took a happy turn, and the man in the desert was rescued by a passing caravan of scientific researchers, and whisked back to the cradle of European civilisation. Whereupon Andreas lost all respect for the hero. He was about to get up and leave when there appeared on the screen the image of the school friend whose picture he had seen a little earlier, behind the proprietor’s back, when he had been propping up the bar. It was Kanjak the great footballer. Seeing him on the screen reminded Andreas that once, twenty years ago, he and Kanjak had shared a school bench, and he decided to make inquiries the next morning as to whether his old friend was presently in Paris.

For our Andreas had no less than nine hundred and eighty francs in his pocket.

And that is a not inconsiderable sum.

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