Joseph Roth: Strawberries

My birthplace was home to about ten thousand people. Three thousand of them were insane, if not dangerously so. A mild insanity wafted around them like a golden cloud. They carried on their businesses and earned money. They married and had children. They read books and newspapers. They concerned themselves with the things of this world. They conversed with one another in all the languages that were used by the very diverse population of this part of the world.

My fellow-citizens were gifted people.  Many of them now reside in the great cities of the old world and the new. All of them are important, and some of them are famous.  It is from my homeland that the Paris doctor comes, who rejuvenates rich old men, and recovers the virginities of old ladies; the Amersterdam astronomer who discovered the comet Gallias; Cardinal P., who for the past two decades has been making policy for the Vatican; the Scottish Archbishop Lord L.; the Milan rabbi K., whose mother tongue was Coptic; they great shipping-agent S., whose business sign may be read in ever railway station in the world, and in every port on five continents.  I will not give their names. Any of my readers who subscribe to a newspaper will be familiar with them.  My own name is immaterial.  No one knows it, as I live under an assumed one. For what it's worth, I'm called Naphtali Kroy.

I'm what's called a conman.  That's what they call people in Europe who claim to be something other than what they really are.  It's no different from what every Western European does. Only, they aren't conmen, because they have papers, passports, identity cards, birth certificates. Some even have family trees. Whereas I have a false passport, no birth certificate, and no family tree.  So it's fair to say:  Naphtali Kroy is a conman.

In my homeland I didn't need any papers. Everyone knew who I was.  I cleaned the burgomaster’s boots when I was six years old.  When I was twelve, I was apprenticed to a barber. There I soaped the burgomaster’s chops.  At fifteen, I became a coachman, and I took the burgomaster for drives on Sundays.  We had thirteen policemen. I drank schnapps with every one of them.  What did I need papers for?

The countryside was run by the gendarmerie. Their sergeant slept with my aunt on Thursday afternoons. I sometimes smuggled schnapps from the country into the town—which was unlawful and liable for duty. The gendarmerie sergeant winked at the customs men, and they never bothered me.

In short, I was on a good footing with the authorities when I was young. Later on, things changed. Times changed, authorities changed.

I don’t think anyone had papers where I came from. There was a law court, a prison, lawyers, tax offices—but there wasn’t anywhere where you had to identify yourself. What did it matter who you were arrested as, if they arrested you? If you paid taxes or not—whom did it drive to ruin, and who derived any benefit from it?  The main thing was that the officials had to live. They lived off bribes. That’s why no one went to prison. That’s why no one paid taxes. That’s why no one had papers.

Occasionally, there were grave crimes, trivial crimes were not investigated.

Fire-raising was overlooked, that was an act of personal retribution. Vagrancy, begging and hawking were all long-established local pratices. Forest fires were dealt with by foresters. Affray and manslaughter were put down to excessive consumption of alcohol.  Robbers and muggers were not pursued, on the grounds that they punished themselves sufficiently by renouncing ordinary human society, trade and conversation. Counterfeiters put in an appearance from time to time.  They were left in peace, because they damaged the government more than they did their fellow-citizens. The courts and lawyers were kept busy, if only because they worked terribly slowly. They made it their business to settle conflicts and arbitrate in disagreements. Payments were invariably in arrears.

Where I came from, we lived at peace. Only near neighbors were enemies. People got drunk together and made it up. Commerical rivals did nothing to hurt one another. They took it out on the customer and the client. They all owed money to each other. None had anything to hold against any of the others.

There was no tolerance of political parties. No distinctions were drawn between people of different nationalities, because everyone spoke every language. Only the Jews stood out on account of their kaftans and their hats and their superiority.  There were occasional little pogroms. In the general hurly-burly, they were soon forgotten. The murdered Jews were put in the ground, and the plundered ones denied that they had lost anything.

All my compatriots loved Nature, not for her own sake, but because they had a taste for certain of her fruits.

In the autumn, they went into the fields to roast potatoes. In the spring, they trekked into the forest to pick strawberries.

Our autumn consisted of molten gold and molten silver, of wind, swarms of ravens and mild frosts. Autumn lasted almost as long as winter. In August, the leaves turned yellow, in the first days of September already they lay on the ground.  No one bothered to sweep them up. It wasn’t until I came to Western Europe that I saw people sweeping up the autumn into a proper dungheap.  No wind blew on our clear autumn days. The sun was still very hot, and already very slant and very yellow. It went down in a red west, and rose every morning from a bed of silver and mist. It took a long time for the sky to become a deep blue, but then it stayed like that for the whole of the short day.

The fields were yellow and rough and prickly and they hurt your feet.  Their smell was stronger than it was in spring, more acrid and intractable.  The forests at their edges remained green—they were conifers. In autumn, they got silver crests on their tops.  We roasted potatoes. There was a smell of fire, coal, burnt potato skins and scorched earth. The swamps, which were all around, bore a light sparkling glaze of frost. They smelled as dank as fishermen’s nets.  In many places, smoke rose steeply and teasingly into the sky.  From nearby and distant farmyards, came the crowing of cocks who had caught a whiff of the smoke.

In November, we had our first snow. It was thin, brittle and durable.  It didn’t melt.  At that point we stopped roasting potatoes. We stayed at home.  We had bad stoves, cracks in the doors, and gaps in the flooring. Our window frames were made of light, unseasoned fir, they had warped duing the summer, and now they didn’t close properly. We stuffed cotton wool into the joins. We laid newspaper under the doors. We chopped wood for the winter.

In March, when the icicles dripped from the eaves, we could alrady hear spring galloping up. We disregarded the snowdrops in the forests. We waited till May.  We were going picking strawberries.

The woodpeckers were already hammering at the trees.  It rained a lot.  The rains were soft, water in its most velvety form.  It might rain for a day, two days, a week. A wind blew, but the clouds didn’t budge, they stood in the sky, immovable, like fixed stars. It rained diligently and thoroughly. The paths softened.  The swamps encroached into the forests, frogs swam in the underbrush.  The wheels of the peasants’ carts no longer crunched. All vehicles moved as though on rubber tires.  The hooves of the horses were silent. Everybody took off their boots, hung them over their shoulders, and waded barefoot.

It cleared overnight. One morning, the rain stopped. The sun came out, as though back from holiday.

That was the day we had been waiting for. On that day the strawberries had to be ripe.