Free The Silent Prophet by Joseph Roth Page A

lead, soldered around its edges. They were sealed down under the sky. In prison, at least, one knew that a sky still arched above the walls. But here the very freedom was an imprisonment. In the leaden sky there were no bars through which one could spy another sky of blue air. The vastness of this space was more confining than a cell.
    Gradually they broke up into ever smaller groups. With tears in their eyes and their beards they bade each other farewell. Friedrich, Berzejev and Lion stayed together. On the first day they still spoke of one or other with whom they had sung together. As soon as they struck up in a threesome the songs that had flowed from everyone's throats a few days previously, they remembered those others whose voices they would never hear again. The songs had become a kind of resonant bond of amity. They had brought strangers together with the power of blood shed in common and pain suffered in common. Then the departed were gradually forgotten. Only now and again did there revive in memory a face that no longer bore a name, a tear in a black beard that no longer belonged to any face, and a word would ring out whose speaker was no longer known.
    They were led far and stragglingly, they saw the unpeopled shores of the Obi. The two small settlements of Hurgut and Narym seemed to them large and lively towns. They stayed overnight in Narym. They learned to collect bugs in their fists and drown them in large buckets, also to coax the small white files of lice from the walls into paper cornets and burn them. They began to esteem the lonely scattered jails where they chanced to halt as welcoming homes. They saw distant forest fires, bartered with Chinese merchants from Chifu for Siberian fur gloves and boots of reindeer hide. They listened to the legends of the Yakuts about the Indiguirka River, and the Dogdo rivulet which carries gold along its bed.
    Winter came. They became accustomed to 67 degrees Celsius below zero and to the frosted windowpanes of ice in the jurts. And they awaited the forty sunless days in the town of Vierchoiansk, the town with the twenty-three houses.
    It was laid down that their fixed location should be ten versts from a town, ten versts from a river and ten versts from a high-road. Yet they managed to settle by a river, the Kolyma River. It is bigger than the Rhine, only three towns are situated on it. One had nine inhabitants, another a hundred inhabitants in thirty military barracks. Friedrich, Berzejev and Lion decided on the third town of Sredni Kolymsk. Here there were huts placed far apart and only three houses with glazed windows. But within a circle of many miles it was the only place with a church, a steeple and bells—bells that had been cast in the civilized world and whose ringing was like a mother tongue.

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    The Siberian officials of the Tsar did not always deserve the bad reputation they enjoyed among the inhabitants, the condemned and even their superior authorities. Some, who considered themselves as exiles, and not without reason, were resolved to share the lot of the prisoners rather than intensify it. Many started off by avenging their fate on the condemned but mellowed after a few years when they saw that their harshness brought them no advantage. Arrogance, vanity and terror dwindled, since the controlling authorities were so far away. Others again allowed themselves to be bribed and lived on with a bad conscience. A bad conscience can make both autocrats and thugs indulgent.
    Berzejev had made friends with Colonel Lelewicz, a Pole, who had assumed command of an infantry detachment in Siberia in order to have an opportunity of helping his exiled fellow-countrymen. He enjoyed such good connections in Petersburg that he did not need to conceal his sentiments behind a martial loyalty to the Tsar like other officers and officials. With his help Friedrich, Berzejev and Lion established themselves in one of the three houses furnished with windowpanes. Thus they lived in a