The Tale of the 1002nd Night by Joseph Roth

Author:Joseph Roth [Roth, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-06-13T20:00:00+00:00

19

Far and wide, the world was deeply, horribly deeply at peace, and the official police records, which included even the most trifling incidents, ran to barely two and a half pages a day. The group of crime reporters sat in a depressive huddle in the Café Wirzl, exhausted by the never-ending tranquility, lamed by the uneventful peace, and without the remotest hope of a sensation. Each time the door opened, the men looked up from their cards. When it was one of the detectives who were forever popping in and out of Wirzl’s, they looked at him expectantly, as though their eyes could pick up what their ears could not yet hear. “Any news?” five or six men asked all at once. The detective kept his hat on, an indication that he wasn’t staying and had nothing to relate. The heads drooped back over the cards once more in lethargic resignation. Only the reporter Lazik was quietly following a certain idea. He didn’t let it show at all. He was careful to look just as fatigued as the others by the hopelessness of these miserably tranquil times. But all the while he was spinning thread after thread, weaving them into webs and breaking them up again, trying to coax apparently unrelated matters into a brotherly knot, but also cutting apart things that did go together, because he needed all the individual members of a family of thought for different links, chains, and relations. He alone intuited a connection between the death of the banker Efrussi and that of Josephine Matzner. Unless his memory deceived him, it was Efrussi who had advanced money on the surety of Mizzi Schinagl’s famous pearls, and probably sold the same pearls on to Antwerp. It wasn’t possible to establish any direct connections between the pearls, Persia, the Shah, Frau Matzner, Efrussi, and Mizzi Schinagl, but the indirect ones looked rather promising. Beyond that, the unattractive deception that had been practiced on the foolish Muslim had involved Baron Taittinger as well. A good thing that the late Frau Matzner had found time to drop in on the Café Wirzl so soon before her sudden death! Material was plentiful. Lazik, prick up your ears! said Lazik.

One morning, while they were all slumped over their dejected game of tarok, Lazik heaved a deep sigh. “What’s the matter,” asked Keiler, “has the Muse returned to you?” This ranked as an insult in that circle. There were still a couple of hacks who remembered a slim volume of Lazik’s. “It makes a man melancholy,” said Lazik, “to be reminded of death. It seems like only yesterday that Frau Matzner, God rest her soul, was sitting over there, and now she’s food for the worms. All the money she left!” The others merely nodded. “It was time for her to die,” said Sedlacek. “Things have moved on. She didn’t belong anymore. The new house on the Zollamtstraße finished her off.” “The high point of her life,” said Lazik, “was the Shah’s visit.

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