The Last Days (7 page)

Koogan expressed his joy at seeing them again. A whole year had gone by, yes, it was in fact a full year since they’d last met, in September 1940. He recalled episodes from Zweig’s South American lecture tour—he called it a triumph, how else could one describe those crowds who had come to listen to the author whose books had then sold by the thousands? Koogan listed the countries they’d visited. No one else could achieve that kind of success. No other author in the world. Not even Thomas Mann. Koogan stressed how proud he was to be Zweig’s editor, the editor of the greatest living writer of their time.

“Would you like some champagne to celebrate our reunion?”

Stefan declined Koogan’s offer. “The greatest living writer of their time,” Koogan repeated. Stefan was very fond of Abrahão Koogan and therefore forgave him his excessive excitability. Koogan spoke of a time that no longer existed. His books had been banned all over Europe. He no longer had a homeland, or even a house.

“Is it true that you’re learning Portuguese?” Koogan enquired.

Stefan replied in the affirmative. He was fluent in French and English. During his South American tour, he had given his lectures in Spanish. He entertained the slightly foolish notion that he would one day have learnt so many languages that his German vocabulary would simply dissolve into the melting pot of foreign words. The German language would be nothing but a dead tongue in his mouth. He would expel it with a cough. Then and only then would he be able to get on with his life. Nevertheless, German was a stubborn tongue. Even though it had poisoned the universe, its honeyed words still flowed
effortlessly
from his mouth.

“Reveal all,” Koogan said, “I’m eager to hear what’s in that manuscript you’ve brought along with you.”

Zweig held out the package, asking him to take care of it. He only had two copies, and the second copy had left Rio the previous night and was headed for Sweden, being intended for that dear Gottfried Bermann-Fischer, who was currently living in exile in Stockholm and who had set up a small German-language imprint there. When he’d dropped the package off at the post office, he’d felt as though he were throwing a message in a bottle out to sea. By the time the ship reached its destination, the Germans would undoubtedly have conquered Sweden.

“I’m extremely proud to be the first to hold one of your books,” Koogan said excitedly, “and it doesn’t matter which book it is. Your autobiography!” He lifted his eyes to the heavens. “I’m holding
The World of Yesterday
in my hands!”

Who could still be interested in the story of his life? What had been the point of all those months he’d spent in America, sequestered in the prison of his past? He reproached himself for being so proud. For wanting to write a memoir while the fates of
his nearest and dearest hung in the balance! Half of his friends were in cemeteries, while the other half were pacing around a German dungeon. He’d often felt ashamed of this project. In an attempt to exculpate himself, he’d tried to explain his motives for doing so. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really an autobiography. He hadn’t wanted to tell the story of his life. It wasn’t about him. His life wouldn’t interest anyone. He could sum it up in a few words. He was born. He had written, he had never stopped writing. He had fled, he would never stop fleeing. He hadn’t wanted to pour his heart out. The book’s aim had been to describe the exceptional people he’d rubbed shoulders with. To paint a picture of an era that was on its way out, a world that the Nazis were desperately trying to obliterate. Writing that book had been like forging a funerary urn to accommodate all of those friends who hadn’t received a proper burial. He had wanted to bear witness. He had wanted to erect a memorial stone in the midst of all those ruins. He had the terrible feeling that the swastika would fly from flagpoles in Berlin, Vienna—and the whole of Europe—for decades to come. He had resigned himself to no longer having a homeland. But he wanted to tell his readers that the world hadn’t always been like this. He didn’t know whether his book conveyed a hopeful message, or whether his readers would instead be plunged into deep despair. He’d never written any of his books with a message in mind. He had often been criticized for this. He wasn’t
engagé
. He had nothing to say to the world other than recounting the wild passions experienced by his heroes and heroines. He envied the Manns—Thomas, Heinrich and Klaus—his namesake Arnold Zweig, that die-hard socialist. He also envied Martin Buber, Sholem Asch and Einstein, who had fought for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. He didn’t have any fixed ideologies. He hated ideologies. He had simply looked
for the words to express “we existed”. He wasn’t sure he’d been able to bring the civilization he’d known to life in his books. You had to have grown up in Vienna in order to understand the scale of the atrocities it had suffered. He had wanted to engrave a message on a headstone that would prove to future generations that although it was now extinct, the world had once been home to a race called
Homo austrico-judaicus
. Those who read
The World of Yesterday
would not come across any revelations regarding how his mother had begrudged him her love, or how affectionate his father had been to his two sons. He hadn’t written a word about his love life or his two wives. On perusing it, his readers might very well wonder whether he was all head and no heart. In fact, Stefan only appeared in the book as an observer. He had written it quickly, producing the first draft of four hundred pages in only six weeks. The man who had usually struggled to finish sixty-page novellas had penned four hundred pages in a month and a half. The only question left was what to call it. He had given up on
My Three Lives
for the reasons listed above, while
Our Generation
had struck him as too personal. He wasn’t entirely satisfied with
The World of Yesterday.
Why not
Memoirs of a European?

“You’ll have all the time you need to settle on one,” Koogan replied.

He kept quiet. Did he really have all the time to decide? He would turn sixty the following month. He’d lived long enough. He believed he’d seen enough.

Koogan pulled a cigar case out of his jacket’s inside pocket and extracted a Virginia Brissago. He said:

“I believe they’re your favourites.”

Stefan explained he would smoke his later as he had to rush off to another important appointment. He added that Lotte and Koogan should remain seated and enjoy the sublime setting.
He wouldn’t be long. Koogan consented cheerfully. Lotte gazed wistfully at her husband, wanting to remind him of her offer, but she refrained from doing so, pretending to acquiesce, but then added in a whisper:

“Are you sure you won’t need me?”

But he’d already got up. He shook Koogan’s hand and left.

E
VERY MORNING
he gazed at the heights of Petrópolis from the veranda, feasting his eyes, long since accustomed to drabness, on the splendour of the world. At dawn, he had an appointment with the light. The air filled with birdsong and the earth sprang back to life. Sometimes, he would catch himself thinking: today, the wind will bring gloomy clouds, black dust will obscure the sun and hummingbirds will launch into a death fugue. But no, each time the dawn illuminated the horizon. Life continued to unfurl like a wave.

He left his post to consume the breakfast the housekeeper had prepared for him. He drank his
cafezinho
, whose strong, sweet taste erased all trace of the aromas of the coffees he’d enjoyed in Michaelerplatz. Afterwards he sipped a glass of guava juice, sucked on a
jabuticaba
and savoured an
açaí
berry—which according to Rosaria was said to contain the elixir of youth.

Yet he couldn’t stop himself from listening to the news. Japan was preparing to declare war on America. Admiral Dönitz’s U-boats had unleashed a reign of terror on the oceans. German troops were advancing on the Soviet Union in the
Drang nach Osten,
or the push towards the east, the same policy that Ludendorff had employed in 1918, but which was now being implemented far more efficiently. Lithuania, Ukraine and the Crimea had fallen,
Kiev, Minsk, Leningrad and Riga had fallen—how could he not ponder the fates of those millions of Jews in their ghettos who were at the mercy of those Nazi soldiers? Goering’s tanks were at the gates of Moscow and Operation Barbarossa had been an unqualified success. The Nazis were looting the world of its gold and leaving ashes and cinders in their wake.

The Germans had redefined the concept of evil. There were stories of soldiers going after children. As the Reich’s armies advanced, they left small detachments of the SS behind, whose sole aim was to eliminate all Jews from conquered lands. The troops liquidated the ghettos. Soldiers fired their bullets into the skulls of mothers and their children, as well as all men, young and old alike. How far would they go? In the beginning, he had doubted these accounts. Besides, those reports sounded so similar he’d begun to question their veracity. Maybe he was the one who was losing his mind, having removed himself from the world. Horror had become the overriding truth of these times.

The following thought had impressed itself upon him: that news of barbarism’s sweeping victories no longer affected him like it used to. He was able to redirect his gaze away from headlines bearing tales of catastrophes. Had he grown jaded? Was the warm breeze making his head spin? Did the
cachaça
that Rosaria served him—which she assured him had nothing but sugar cane in it—contain an evil potion? He liked to think that those little bitter-tasting red berries, which he relished despite not knowing what they were, had cast some sort of spell on him; or that the cult to which Rosaria belonged, in which she made offerings to idols and prayed to them, had produced its desired results. He thought about Exu, one of the earth deities Rosaria worshipped. Exu was a demigod whom he dreamt of imitating, a being who had neither
friends nor enemies and who saw beyond good and evil—even though some people considered him the Devil incarnate.

A line by Heinrich Heine, the great Heine, whose books were also being burnt, kept coming back to him:

He didn’t want to think about Germany. He hoped he might one day enjoy a full night’s sleep.

The political situation in Rio was improving. Needless to say, the regime remained a kind of dictatorship, since Vargas had more in common with Franco than with Roosevelt. His Estado Novo had banned all political parties and thrown communists into prison. Still, even though the president, a follower of Machiavelli, had once made friendly overtures to the Reich, he was now realigning himself with the United States. Brazil’s economic interests lay north, not east. The South allied to the North. All of America, the largest of the continents, was going to war with the Nazified Old World. No, the future didn’t look too bleak.

He dared to hope again. A small miracle had occurred during the previous week. He had gone down into the cellar and had found a wooden case full of books amidst the jumble of furniture and linens. In it, there were three schoolbooks, two mathematics textbooks, a French dictionary and a number of Portuguese volumes. When he came across
The Kreutzer
Sonata
and
Anna Karenina
, he saw himself back in 1928, in a thick wood alongside Tolstoy’s daughter as they walked towards the genius’s grave.

Then the miracle occurred. His hand had pulled out two volumes of Montaigne’s
Essays
. The covers were graced with a portrait of Montaigne, who seemed to be smiling at him. He’d
bundled the books under his arm and leapt up the stairs. Settling on the veranda, he’d begun to read, as though he’d just received a long-awaited letter from a distant friend. He had read the
Essays
as a young man, but what could stoicism, wisdom and self-control possibly have mattered to a twenty-year-old? He had been obsessed with Nietzsche at the time. He’d written an entire biography of Nietzsche, the very same Nietzsche whom Goebbels later adopted as his moral authority.

Times had changed. The world had begun to resemble the one that Montaigne had lived in. The earth was an inferno, an endless St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. His own life seemed to be taking the same course as the Frenchman’s: the life of a recluse, a fugitive. The plague had descended over Europe, like it had once ravaged the kingdom of France. The plague had broken out in Montaigne’s house, just like it had come knocking on his door at Kapuzinerberg. Stefan had fled Salzburg, just like Montaigne had quit his castle in Bordeaux. The Frenchman—a great-grandson of Moshe Paçagon—had wandered from town to town, an outcast, misunderstood, claiming to be afraid of dying, afraid of the plague, shouting that he wanted to live, to save his skin. Stefan and Montaigne weren’t heroes. They had lived four hundred years apart, but had been driven by the same obsession: to remain true to themselves—during the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Kristallnacht.

He read with great zeal. It was as if he were hearing a brother’s voice whisper in his ear: “Don’t worry about humanity as it self-destructs, go ahead and build your own world.” It was a soothing voice imbued with wisdom and kindness. Having finished reading the first volume, he was seized by an idea. Since he wasn’t able to finish his
Balzac
—he had neither the energy nor the talent to write about Balzac—why not write a biography
of Montaigne? That would give him a reason to get out of bed each morning and go meet the brother whom destiny had sent his way—Stefan’s actual brother, Alfred, had found asylum in New York, but despite the love he bore for him, they felt like strangers to one another. Indeed, what he shared with Montaigne was a brotherhood forged by destiny, and in order to write his biographies, he needed to feel impassioned by his subject matter, as well as to identify with it. “You’re wonderfully versed in the art of transference,” Freud had said. Talking about someone else was a way of talking about himself. He had written twenty or so essays, but he didn’t think of himself as a historian, nor did he claim to be a biographer. He was a writer, that was all. The veracity of events was of secondary importance, and he was never worried about the business of working on the book itself. Jules Romains had been right to mock him for his inability to distance himself from his subjects, criticizing the confessional undertones coursing through his biographies, the inaccuracies that his writing was riddled with—ah, his
Stendhal
! He was only interested in individuals, in getting inside their minds, revealing their secrets and—rather than taking the stance of an erudite scholar—diving into the innermost depths of their souls, shedding light on those mysterious men and women. Yes, he was going to start work on
Montaigne
. Maybe writing it would allow him to learn how his subject had been able to hold on to his sanity? Writing about Montaigne might help him understand how he’d kept his humanity intact in the midst of all that barbarism.

Lotte woke up bright and early that morning. It had been a month since she’d recovered her health. Her asthma didn’t disrupt her
sleep any more and her heart rate had adopted a slower rhythm. She was once more the young woman he’d laid eyes on seven years earlier. The whole house was under a spell. The illness had been scared off. The Devil no longer darkened their door.

It was sometime around noon when Lotte came home. She had accompanied Rosaria to the market. They had walked along the Rua da Imperatriz and stopped in front of the cathedral, which was swarming with a crowd of worshippers; they had then gone down Avenida Koeler, admired the Palacio Rio Negro and crossed the canal to reach Praça Rui Barbosa.

“Rosaria thinks my accent has improved, and to think of all the trouble I had with English!… We stopped by a stall close to the Casa do Barão—the guava juice was delicious!”

Her voice no longer quivered. Her face no longer bore the signs of fear. Her melancholy had lifted entirely. She had come back to life.

“Today,” she carried on, “Rosaria taught me a number of things. Soon I’ll have learnt as much Portuguese as you and I’ll finally be able to go to Rio on my own, seeing as how you don’t enjoy going there and would prefer to stay here, which I can of course understand, you have to write, and you can finally get to down to work in total tranquillity. I would really love to stroll down the Avenida Rio Branco, go to the Praça Floriano theatre, walk on the beach… To ask ‘Where is the bus stop?’ you say:
‘Onde é o ponto de ônibus?
’; ‘a ticket for’ is ‘
uma passagem para
’; ‘I want to go’ is ‘
Quero ir para
’; ‘to go shopping’ is ‘
fazer compras
’; ‘it’s too expensive’ is ‘
muito caro
’.”

She burst out laughing.

“I want that dress:
muito caro!
”

He told her she could go to Rio by herself; they would book her a taxi and Koogan’s nephews could take her around the city.

“What about you?” she asked. “You’re the one I want by my side. I know it’s not a good time for you. You’ve finally started writing again. I shouldn’t distract you. Did you work well last night?”

He nodded. He had gradually recovered his focus. He had begun researching Montaigne at the public library in Petrópolis and, much to his surprise, had found quite a few books on the French writer on its shelves. Fate had given him another push in the right direction: Fortunat Strowski, the renowned authority on Montaigne, was now living in Rio. Koogan had offered to arrange a meeting.

“You see,” she said, “the tide is turning. The bad times are already behind us.”

She was right. The best was yet to come.

“It’s such a beautiful day outside. Come and take the air with me, you’ll go back to writing later feeling invigorated.”

They went to a little square by Avenida Koeler and sat down on the terrace of a café, where a number of wealthy
cariocas
were also seated, no doubt enjoying their summer holiday in the resort.

They ordered. Soon enough, one of the ladies left her group, walked in their direction, stood in front of Stefan and launched into the following in a heavily accented English:

“Excuse me, you’re… Stefan Zweig, aren’t you? The newspapers have reported your presence in Petrópolis. My name is Consuela Burgos, my husband is Professor Burgos, the best surgeon in Rio… I’ve read all your books:
Beware of Pity, Fear
and
Downfall of the Heart
, and the one I’ve been rereading nonstop,
Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
. I have always asked myself how a man could possibly penetrate the female psyche to such an extent. What’s your secret, does it come down to research, do you interview women? Where do you dig up all of
these truths? I tend to use an expression whenever I speak about you, I call you a soul searcher… Through you, I was able to visit Monte Carlo with Mrs C., the heroine of your book, and I must admit that I too fell madly in love with that young man and his beautiful hands… and, if I may confide in you, since you’ve become something of a friend, a friend whose words warm the heart, that I too once experienced such passions, unfortunately the affair was short-lived, but he stole my heart regardless, one should never trust men… Well, let’s forget about the past. I have another confession to make: I have written some novellas, a little like yours, in which I describe women who have been ravaged by their passions, but my heroines are different from yours, they never think of putting their lives to an end, no, they’re too keen on living for that, and don’t you think that in a way they’re right? Isn’t life worth living in a place like this, which has been blessed by the gods? No, these ladies always wind up going back to their cherished husbands, who forgive their wives for having strayed, after all, it’s only an affair. If you would be so kind, I will leave my manuscripts at the bar tomorrow and you’ll get back to me about them, won’t you? Don’t make me wait too long, my calm appearance belies a tormented soul… Before I take my leave, I would like to thank you on behalf of the Brazilian people for your book
Brazil, Land of the Future.
My husband said that it was as if you’d anatomized our continent… But above all else, don’t you listen to any of those criticisms launched against you, we know that this book wasn’t commissioned by the government, that our president didn’t pay you to sing this country’s praises. You’re an honest man, Mr Zweig, and even if your book regrettably paints a folkloristic portrait of Brazil, let me ask you, what else could one expect from a foreigner? And as I’ve said to those who criticized you: you specialize in the hearts of women, not
the hearts of countries. It’s as if someone asked my husband to treat tuberculosis, why he would just go ahead and remove the patient’s lungs… You described Brazil exactly as you saw it, and as I’m standing right in front of you, I can confirm that your gaze is far more intense than photographs of you would suggest. You have an honest look in your eyes, and if your wife would allow me, because presumably this is your wife, delighted to meet you, madam, it’s an honour, I expect you are fully aware of how privileged you are to be married to such a man, married to a man who probes the hearts of women, you better believe it, married to the man who pierces through men’s bodies, you’re really lucky… I don’t want to take up too much of your time, so, before taking my leave, could you sign my handkerchief, there you are, it’s cut from the nicest cloth, heartfelt thanks, Mr Zweig, and above all follow my advice, forget about all the articles that accused you of betraying your host country. Don’t believe a word they say: ‘Zweig sold his pen for a visa’, or those who maintain that
Brazil, Land of the Future
was commissioned by the government. No, you’re not a propagandist working for our great President Vargas—may God watch over his soul—all those who speak about you like that are nothing but malicious gossips. You’re goodness personified.”