The Governess and Other Stories (20 page)

That afternoon they grow many years older. And only when they are alone in the darkness of their room in the evening do childish fears surface in them, the fear of loneliness, of images of dead people, as well as a presentiment of indistinct terrors. In the general agitation of the house, no one has remembered to heat the rooms. So they get into one bed together, freezing, holding each other tightly in their thin childish arms, pressing their slender bodies, not yet in the full bloom of youth, close to each other as if seeking help in their fear. They still dare not talk freely. But now the younger girl at last bursts into tears, and her elder sister joins her, sobbing wildly. They weep, closely entwined, warm tears rolling down their faces hesitantly at first, then falling faster, hugging one another breast to breast, shaking as they share their sobs. They are united in pain, a single weeping body in the darkness. They are not crying for the governess now, or for the parents who are lost to them; they are shaken by a sudden horror and fear of the unknown world lying ahead of them, after the first terrifying glimpse that they had of it today. They are afraid of the life ahead of them into which they will now pass, dark and menacing like a gloomy forest through which they must go. Their confused fears become dimmer, almost dreamlike, their sobbing is softer and softer. Their breath mingles gently now, as their tears mingled before. And so at last they fall asleep.

This selection of four novellas by Stefan Zweig contains stories from different periods in his career. The first in the book,
Did He Do It?
, is clearly the last to have been written, although the precise details of its publishing history seem to be uncertain. It is first recorded as appearing in book form in 1987, as part of the collected works of Zweig published by S Fischer, in a volume of several Zweig stories under the general title of
Praterfrühling—
—
Prater Spring
. Internal evidence, however, clearly suggests that this late story must have been written when Zweig was living in Bath just before the outbreak of the Second World War. He had left Austria in 1934, and although he went back for a brief visit later, when the annexation of the country by Nazi Germany was imminent, he did not go to his house in Salzburg, where his first wife and stepdaughters were still living. What seems to have been a fairly amicable divorce followed. Zweig came to live in exile in England, first in London and then in Bath with Lotte Altmann, who was to be his second wife. In his memoir
The World of Yesterday
he describes, with great affection, the city of Bath and the countryside around it in the summer of 1939, when war was brewing. “Such madness,” he wrote, “seemed incredible in the face of those meadows flowering on in luxuriant bloom, the peace that the valleys around Bath breathed as if enjoying it themselves.” But in early September of that year war came, and Zweig and Lotte, fearing internment as enemy aliens even though he had become a British citizen, swiftly left the country—first for the United States and then for Brazil, where they committed suicide together in February 1942.

The setting of the story in and near Bath, then, places
Did He Do It?
among Zweig’s last works, probably postdated only by the completion of his memoir
The World of Yesterday
, which he had been writing on and off for some time, and his last novella, the famous
Schachnovelle
, often known in English versions as
The Royal Game
, probably written in the autumn of 1941 and published, like the memoir, after his suicide.

Interestingly and rather touchingly, in
Did He Do It?
Zweig is partly emulating the classic English country-house murder mystery, setting a puzzle that involves a probably deliberate killing and the identity of the murderer, even challenging the reader with a title that is a question (in German,
War er es?
—Was it he?). It is also one of several Zweig novellas in which events are narrated through the voice of a woman, in this case Betsy, the wife of a retired colonial official.

The Miracles of Life
dates from a much earlier period, and was first published in 1904. Zweig took a great interest in historical subjects, and wrote a number of historical biographies of figures such as Mary Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette, Magellan and Fouché. Here he imagines the city of Antwerp in 1566, when the Low Countries were still under Spanish rule but beginning to rebel under the Prince of Orange of that time. No date is actually mentioned in the story, but 1566 was the year in which the rioting and iconoclasm in Antwerp that form the background to the novella took place. Zweig, although Jewish, was not an observant Jew. His family had long ago assimilated entirely to the European society of the time, and much later than this story, as Nazi anti-Semitism became rife, Zweig pointed out correctly how much Jews had contributed to the intellectual and cultural lives of many European nations, not least Germany and Austria. But here he presents a sixteenth-century Jewish character who greatly values her lost family background—the girl Esther, rescued from a pogrom by a rough-mannered but good-hearted soldier going home to Antwerp to open an inn. The old painter who is the central character of the story sees her as the perfect model for a painting of the Virgin Mary that he is commissioned to provide as an altarpiece. Devout Christian of his time as he is, he also sees it as his duty to convert her, an idea that horrifies Esther. None the less, genuine friendship develops between the old man and the girl, who tragically dies in a riot when she goes to the cathedral to look at the painting of the baby who modelled with her, and whom she came to love passionately. From a man who was not fervently religious in any way, it is an interesting study of the conflict of two deeply held faiths, and the reconciliation in human terms of the two who represent them. Zweig also had an eye for a detailed historical background, for instance in his account of the cathedral and quayside of Antwerp before the story proper begins.

Another study of Jewish background lies at the core of
Downfall of the Heart
, where the old Jewish businessman who rose from humble origins and worked hard to make a fortune, finds that his wife and daughter do not appreciate his generosity as he thinks they should. In his memoir, Zweig describes, with astonished indignation, the way in which girls when he was growing up in Vienna were deliberately kept in ignorance about both intellectual life (not a proper pursuit for a woman) and sexuality. The old man’s daughter Erna, however, is of a later generation; she is a Bright Young Thing of the Twenties, cheerfully flirts with many admirers and, as her father discovers to his horror, is sleeping with one of them. Neither Erna nor her mother behaves well, but the old man’s growing rancour and resentment are a grim theme; he withdraws from his family into private brooding and ultimately into the comforts of his traditional religious faith. The strong note of observant Judaism struck at the end is something rarely found in Zweig’s work.

The short story
The Governess
, first published in 1911, takes us, however, right back to the prim propriety of Vienna in the early twentieth century as described in
The World of Yesterday
. Zweig mentions an aunt of his own who, on her wedding night, “suddenly appeared back in her parents’ apartment at one in the morning,” complaining that her new husband “was a madman and a monster. In all seriousness, he had tried to take her clothes off.” The aunt must have been seventeen or so at the time, I suppose. What, we may wonder, was her mother thinking of, to keep her in the dark and leave her there? In view of that story, it is not surprising that the two sisters in
The Governess
, aged twelve and thirteen, are entirely ignorant of the facts of life, and are puzzled to hear their governess, of whom they are very fond, telling their student cousin Otto that he and she will have a baby—a baby is “on the way”, is the implication of the German expression: literally, “I have a child by you”, but the use of the present tense in German makes the girls assume that the baby has already been born. So where
is
the baby? They would love to ask Miss about it. Is it a boy or a girl? But only married people have babies, and their governess is not married! A century later, it is impossible to imagine girls of that age in such a state of ignorance; these sisters, who come to feel that the adult world is set against them, reflect from a feminine point of view the experience of the boy Edgar in
Burning Secret
of 1913, two years later, as he tries to puzzle out the nature of the secret that grown-ups so enviably seem to know.

These four stories are wide-ranging in the diversity of their subjects and the author’s approach to them. The least autobiographical of writers in his fiction, Stefan Zweig none the less integrates into it many themes that intrigued his imagination. To read his memoir casts light on many of his stories.

ANTHEA BELL

Amok and Other Stories

Translated by Anthea Bell

Beware of Pity

Translated by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt

Burning Secret

Translated by Anthea Bell

Casanova

A Study in Self-Portraiture

Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul

Confusion  
Translated by Anthea Bell

Fantastic Night and Other Stories

Translated by Anthea Bell

The Royal Game

Translated by Anthea Bell

Twilight
Moonbeam Alley

Translated by Anthea Bell

Wondrak and Other Stories

Translated by Anthea Bell

The World of Yesterday

Translated by Anthea Bell

www.pushkinpress.com