There was no particular structure to the conversation. To bring this about, a manufacturer was called on who only arrived around midnight. He had an honorary doctorate and was a member of the Club. Red-faced, with the desperately clutching hands of a drowning man, even though he was standing with both feet on solid ground, he began to cross-examine Tunda.
The manfacturer had concessions in Russia. ‘What is the state of the industries in the Urals?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Tunda confessed.
‘And what about the petroleum in Baku?’
‘Quite good,’ said Tunda, feeling that he had lost ground.
‘Are the workers contented?’
‘Not always!’
‘Exactly,’ said the manufacturer. ‘So the workers are not satisfied. But you know damn-all about Russia, my dear friend. One loses one’s perspective about things when one is close to them, I know. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, dear friend.’
‘Yes,’ said Tunda, ‘one loses perspective. One is so close to things that they cease to be of concern. Just as you give no thought to how many buttons there are on your waistcoat. One can live in the present as if deep in a forest. One encounters people and sheds them again as trees shed leaves. Can’t you understand that it doesn’t seem to me to be of the slightest importance how much petroleum they extract in Baku? It’s a marvellous city. When a wind springs up in Baku …’
‘You are a poet,’ said the manufacturer.
‘Do they read Ilya Ehrenburg in Russia?’ asked the little actress. ‘He is a sceptic.’
‘I’ve never heard that name; who is he?’ said the professor severely.
‘He is a young Russian author,’ said Frau Klara, to the general astonishment.
‘Are you going to Paris this year?’ one of the Parisian group of women asked another.
‘I’ve been looking at the latest hats in Femina, potshaped again, and the costume jackets are slightly belled out. I don’t think it’s worth the trouble this year.’
‘My husband and I were in Berlin last week,’ said the music critic’s wife. ‘There’s a city that’s growing at a tremendous rate. The women get more elegant every day.’
‘Fantastic, fantastic,’ opined the manufacturer. ‘That city leaves the rest of Germany speechless.’
He introduced some story on the theme of Berlin. He always knew exactly when to provide a new focus for the flagging conversation.
He talked about industry and of the new Germany, the workers and the decline of Marxism, politics and the League of Nations, art and Max Reinhardt.
The manufacturer betook himself to an adjoining room. He lay down, half-hidden by a copper font, a Catholic rarity, on a broad sofa. He had loosened his patent-leather shoes, undone his collar, his shirt-front gaped like a double folding door, a silk handkerchief lay on his bare chest. That was how Tunda found him.
‘I understood you perfectly well earlier, Herr Tunda,’ said the manufacturer. ‘I understood perfectly what you meant about the wind in Baku. I understood perfectly that you have experienced a great deal, and that we come along in our ignorance and ask you stupid questions. As far as I’m concerned, I put my practical questions for purely selfish reasons. It was, to some extent, my duty. You won’t understand that just yet. You’ll have to live with us a little longer first. Then you too will have to pose specific questions and give specific answers. Everyone here lives by established rules and against his will. Naturally, in the beginning, that is when he first came here, we each had our own opinion. We arranged our lives perfectly freely, no one interfered with us. But after a time, almost without our noticing it, what we had arranged out of free choice became, without actually being written down, a divine decree and so ceased to be the consequence of our choice. All our later thoughts and actions had to be forced through against this decree. Or else we had to circumvent it in some way; we had, so to speak, to wait until it closed its eyes for a moment, out of fatigue. But you are not yet acquainted with this decree.
‘You haven’t as yet any idea what terribly wide-open eyes it has, eyelids stuck to its brows which never close. For instance, when I first came here, I liked wearing coloured shirts with attached collars and without cuffs; but, as time passed it was really in obedience to a very powerful and immutable decree that I should wear this kind of shirt. You cannot imagine how difficult it was for practical reasons — for this was a period when things were going badly for me — to wear white shirts with detachable collars. The decree ordained: manufacturer X wears coloured shirts with attached collars, thereby establishing that he is one of the working people, like his workers and employees. He need only undo his tie, and at once he appears a proletarian. Then, gradually and quite circumspectly, as if I had stolen them from someone, I began to wear white shirts. First once a week, for on that day the decree deigns occasionally to turn a blind eye, then on Saturday afternoons, then on Fridays. When I wore a white shirt for the first time on a Wednesday — Wednesday is my unlucky day anyway — everyone, including my secretary at the office and my foreman in the factory, looked at me reproachfully.
‘Now shirts may not be very important. But they are symbolic. At least, in this case. And it is the same with the really important things. If I came here as a manufacturer, do you think I could ever become a conductor, even if I were ten times better than your brother? Or do you think that your brother could ever become a manufacturer? Now, for all I care, vocation is not such an important matter. It’s not so important how one makes one’s living. But what is important, for example, is love for one’s wife and child. Once you elect voluntarily to be a good paterfamilias, do you think you can ever stop? If, one day, you have announced to your cook: “I don’t like white meat,” do you think you can change your mind ten years later? When I first came here I was very busy, I had to make money, organize a factory — for you must know that I am the son of a Jewish pedlar — I had no time for the theatre, art, music, crafts, religious objects, the Jewish community or Catholic cathedral. So if anyone got too close to me in any connection, I repelled him in a boorish manner. I was, so to say, a boor or a man of action, people were amazed at my energy. The decree seized hold of me, ordained my boorishness, my uncouth behaviour — you will understand that I am compelled to speak to you as the decree lays down. Who ordered me to take up concessions in this stinking Russia? The decree! Don’t you think the wind in Baku interests me more than petroleum? But dare I ask you about the wind? Am I a meteorologist? What would the decree have to say about it?
‘And everyone lies, just as I do. Everyone says what the decree prescribes. The little actress who was asking you earlier about a Russian writer is probably more interested in petroleum. But no, the roles are all allotted. The music critic and your brother, for instance. I know they both gamble on the stock exchange. But what do they talk about? About cultural matters. When you enter a room and see other people present, you know at once what each has to say. Each has his role. That’s how it is in our city. The skin in which each one hides is not his own. And just as it is in our city, so it is everywhere, in at least a hundred great cities in our country.