The Last Days (8 page)

She grabbed the autographed handkerchief and returned to her table.

He had grown sombre and was staring into space. Lotte waved a hand in front of his eyes.

“You see? It’s wonderful, you’re just as famous here as in Vienna!”

He suggested they go back home.

The doorbell echoed in the silent dusk. He heard the housekeeper’s footsteps in the corridor. He overheard a commotion and turned his head.

“Happy birthday, Stefan!”

They had all gathered in the entrance to the lounge: Abrahão Koogan and his wife, Cláudio de Souza, the chair of Brazilian PEN, as well as Ernst Feder and wife—Feder was the former editor-in-chief of the
Berliner Tageblatt
and had recently moved into the house next door. Stefan stood up and embraced his friends one after the other as Lotte looked on from a corner of the room, slightly removed from the commotion. This little party to celebrate Stefan’s sixtieth birthday had been her idea, which she’d hatched in secret over a long period of time. She had hesitated and had even abandoned her plans on a number of occasions. She recalled his words on the matter: “We don’t have the right to be happy in times like this, neither as men nor as Jews. We’re neither better nor more precious than those of us still being hunted down in Europe.” Throughout the week leading up to the party, she had employed a number of ruses in order to make the necessary arrangements. She feared how he might react—he didn’t like surprises and he loathed being feted. On top of that, he abhorred the idea of celebrating his sixtieth birthday. The contrast between his fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays was startling. That decade had seen him transported from a realm of light into one of darkness. On his fiftieth, Stefan had received tons of letters from friends and readers from across the world at his home in Kapuzinerberg. Whereas today he had no fixed address and all his books had gone up in smoke. The 28th of November 1941 terrorized him. He was sixty. He felt he was getting old. A few more months and he would have outlived his father. His friends Ernst Weiss, Erwin Rieger and Ernst Toller had decided to put an end to their lives, while others had either
been murdered or were rotting away in Dachau. Happy birthday? He hadn’t wanted to spend the day at home. He had accepted Lotte’s suggestion that he visit Teresópolis, fifty kilometres north of Rio. They had strolled along the pavements of the city, which was nestled on a mountainside. They had seen the peaks and valleys of the Serra dos Órgãos stretching out as far as the eye could see from every street corner. They had stopped at a restaurant on the Avenida Feliciano-Sodré. It had been a pleasant day. They’d had no reason be to be afraid. On their return, towards the end of the afternoon, he had found a present on top of the table in the lounge, a present that had thrilled him. How on earth had she found Balzac’s collected works at the antiquarian bookseller’s on Rua São José? Although the edition was several decades old, it was complete. He had seen this as a good omen. Balzac had found his way to him. Perhaps all the notes he had collected on the Frenchman in London would also be in his hands soon enough. He had reasons to hope.

Once he’d embraced all his guests, it was time to open his presents. Ernst Feder was the first up, with a leather-bound volume of Montaigne’s works.

“Here you are, my dear Stefan, may his wisdom dispel all your dark thoughts…”

Then came Abrahão Koogan’s turn. A little dog jumped out of the half-open knapsack he was holding in his hand. The fox terrier triggered a wave of laughter when he licked the legs of the assembled guests. De Souza presented him with a paperback edition of
Brazil, Land of the Future
inscribed with birthday greetings from Soarès, the foreign minister.

Next the housekeeper handed him the dozen telegrams that had arrived at the house during the day. Lotte slipped away when her
husband started reading a telex his ex-wife had sent him from New York. She returned a moment later bearing what she knew was the most wonderful present of them all: a parcel from Jules Romains, which had arrived the previous day. From his base in New York, his French friend had put together a
Festschrift
, a celebratory book assembled in the traditional German manner—a glorious gift with which to commemorate a birthday. It was a limited edition of the texts given at the conference that the French author had convened in Paris in 1939 entitled “Stefan Zweig: A Great European”. Its fifty pages sketched a laudatory portrait of the Viennese humanist and came in two volumes, one of which was leather-bound and in French, printed by Éditions de la Maison Française, and the other of which was in English. Jules Romains’s book moved Stefan to tears. Friderike was forgotten!

Feder leafed through the book. “Now you can die in peace,” he said. “They’ve already printed your obituary.”

They dined on a roast served with potatoes on the side, which had been prepared according to a European recipe that Lotte had taught Rosaria, although it had come out a little too spicy and undercooked. When it was time for dessert, Lotte was briefly tempted to open the bottle of champagne that Feder had brought. Yet she remembered her husband’s words: “Jews have nothing to celebrate these days, surviving is the best they can hope for.” No, champagne would be over the top.

When the meal was over, he stood up and went to his desk to pick up a slightly rumpled sheet of paper that had been scribbled on. He then returned to the table and tinkled his glass with a spoon to obtain everyone’s silence. He reassured his audience that his speech would not be overly long. He began by thanking
everyone present. He unfolded the sheet of paper and explained that he’d composed a poem to mark his birthday and he asked his audience to indulge him. He hadn’t written any poetry for a long time, and this would undoubtedly be his last. The poem’s only real merit was that it voiced his current state of being as faithfully as possible. Stefan put his spectacles on and began to read. His voice trembled, but his eyes were dry—that was the most important thing.

A silence fell over the room. The audience seemed perplexed. Stefan folded the sheet, put it in his pocket and sat down. Lotte rose abruptly and hurried off to her bedroom, her eyes wet with tears. Feder quipped:

“You might be well advised to stick to prose… considering the effect your poems have on your loved ones.”

Stefan excused himself, took his leave and went to join his wife. He sat on the bed, beside the weeping Lotte. He whispered a few soothing words, pulled out a handkerchief and dried her cheeks and forehead. In a choked voice, she looked right into his eyes and said:

“I don’t want to live in this world without you. I would follow you into the afterlife, don’t leave me alone!”

He replied that he’d never leave her behind. She could follow him wherever he went.

Those words assuaged Lotte’s distress. Her sobs dried up and he told her he would be rejoining their guests, suggesting she might like to follow him soon. She concurred, kissed him on the lips, grasped his hand and held him tightly in her arms. He had to go back to the lounge. He walked past the mirror on his way out and smoothed a loose lock of hair into place. He wondered whether his hair would soon fall out, just like his teeth had. He was an old man. He straightened his jacket and left the bedroom. Once back with his guests, he adopted the fixed, slightly vapid smile he usually wore during social occasions, which he thought made him look light-hearted and laid back.

Before retiring, he went to the bathroom to pick up his sleeping pills, as he did every night. He emptied three capsules out of the bottle and swallowed them with a little water, replaced the lid, changed his mind, and then doubled the dose.

That night, his mother appeared to him in his sleep. She was pacing up and down the long corridors of the apartment at 17 Rathausstrasse. She was fanning herself gracefully. She wore a long, dark velvet dress. As usual, her high heels didn’t impede her walking and gave the impression she was far taller than her actual height, which was five foot two. She drew nearer, looking radiant, an array of jewels around her neck and bracelets jingling on her wrists. Stefan, a child, was sitting on the floor wearing navy shorts and a striped shirt that she’d picked out for him. He watched her walk by, at a loss as to what to say to make her linger. He ate alone with his brother that evening, like they did every evening. Once she’d walked past, Stefan couldn’t refrain from getting up and running after her to offer up his cheek for a kiss. She pretended to ignore him and kept on walking, without looking back. Once she had reached the end of the corridor, she ordered him back to his room. What was he doing sitting on the floor? That was no way for a Zweig to behave! He started running after her, running until he was out of breath, and when his fingers grazed the fabric of her dress, his world would suddenly fill with a bright light. His mother was stretched out on her bed, her hair had gone white and her skin had lost its former lustre. She didn’t acknowledge him in any way. Her eyes were glum and weary. She had lost her hearing. Her cheeks were sunken and her face was pale. He drew near to caress her arm and his hand wandered in the void. He puckered his lips and his mouth kissed the void.

He woke up with a start, drenched in sweat.

He hadn’t been able to close his mother’s eyes when she’d died. He hadn’t recited the Kaddish. He hadn’t fulfilled the most important commandment that all Jewish children were bound by. By the time Ida Zweig breathed her last in August 1938, he had long
since fled Austria and had been denied permission to return and be by his mother’s bedside. German troops had entered Vienna on 13th March 1938. It had taken only six months for barbarism to be unleashed on the Jews. His mother, an eighty-four-year-old invalid who was hard of hearing, had suffered the worst
humiliations
. During the early days of the
Anschluss
, she had witnessed her son’s books burning on the pyres that had been erected on Viennese squares. If that old lady had been able to muster the requisite strengths to stroll through the Prater’s gardens, she would have been forbidden, under penalty of death, to sit on one of the park benches. It hadn’t taken long for her to fall ill. Cousin Egon was granted permission to visit her, but only once a day. Despite costing an arm and a leg, an Aryan nurse had been engaged and given the adjacent room to sleep in. Yet since an Aryan couldn’t sleep under the same roof as a Jew, Egon had been forbidden to remain by Ida’s side during those final nights, when her end had loomed in sight.

Ida Zweig had died alone on a summer night in 1938. Stefan had felt almost relieved when he’d heard the news. The Nazis had managed to ensure a son would feel relieved by his own mother’s death. At least she had been spared from suffering further abuses and unspeakable cruelties. A few months later, they had forced all the Jews in Vienna to vacate their flats, relocating them outside the Ring, cramming entire families into dilapidated houses. In the space of a year, Vienna had been cleansed of all its Jews.

Although he had given eulogies for so many of his loved ones, from Rilke to Freud, he hadn’t recited the Kaddish for his mother. But he didn’t know how to pray in Hebrew. His parents hadn’t wanted him to learn the language of his ancestors. Who cared about being Jewish in Vienna back then?

T
HE SPIRIT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
had loomed over the hills ever since Ernst Feder had arrived in Petrópolis. The man had been in charge of the
Berliner Tageblatt
, a distinguished newspaper. Prior to the advent of fascism, the neighbours had met one another numerous times in Berlin. Feder had been proud to list Stefan Zweig among his occasional columnists for his literary pages. Whom hadn’t he written for since his first review had been published in Herzl’s
Neue Freie
Presse
in 1901? He had written for every paper and magazine Europe had to offer, praising renowned writers to the skies or introducing emerging talents. Stefan’s own critical reception had been far from welcoming. They had reproached him for his lifelessness and his flippant flights of fancy, only then to seek his support. That travelling circus seemed so shallow and far-removed today.

On some nights he had dined with Feder at the Café Élégant, a restaurant whose tables were arranged at the bottom of Rua Dias. It was a tiny greasy spoon with a frontage that was only a few feet wide, but they offered a variety of dishes besides black beans on their menu and their coffee was better than any he’d had in Vienna. Seated on that terrace in front of a friend who spoke his language, Stefan felt as though he’d stepped back in time.

He was very fond of Feder. He had missed his sense of humour, as well as his cool, detached way of looking at world events. He had the ability to make light of one’s worst fears. He was
quintessentially
German in that way and every inch a Jew. “I remain a natural optimist,” he would dare to say. “Considering the recent turn of events, the Reich is definitely not going to be around for a thousand years. I give them five hundred years at the most… Come on, I guarantee you that just as fervently as I once expressed it to Walter Benjamin: we have no reason to despair!” By what accident of history had the Austrian writer and the journalist from Berlin found themselves in the middle of that valley surrounded by the jungle? They talked about the past. They talked about literature. They evaluated the comparative merits of Heine and Schiller, chatted about Goethe and Nietzsche. They tallied the books they’d been able to take into exile with them. They argued over the “Young Vienna” school. They mused about whether writers like Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Wassermann and Hesse were still worth reading. Yet they never broached the subject of which of these would be remembered by posterity. They never talked about the future. There was no future in this place. Even the present seemed a little unreal. There they were, just the two of them, like a decade earlier, except that creepers had entwined themselves around the café’s sign. The cries of monkeys emerged from the nearby jungle. No, it wasn’t Vienna. They were neither at the Café Central nor at the Café Museum. Petrópolis looked like a ghost city and they were the ghosts. It would have come as no surprise to Stefan had the trees and the mountains started to move and darkness engulfed the earth and the sky.

When their talk shifted to current events, the conversation quickly ran out of steam. They became as silent as though they’d been watching a funeral procession march by. After which they
asked the café owner to bring them a chessboard. They began to play. Stefan was a mediocre player, even though he had recently picked up a little book that summarized the games played by the greatest grandmasters, a book he’d brought with him from New York without really knowing why. He had begun reading it on the boat that had brought them to Brazil and a new idea had come to him. He didn’t know what he would do with this story once he’d finished writing it. The plot had taken shape, at first in his head, then the words had come to him, almost effortlessly. He had never been prey to writer’s block. He would have certainly preferred to be better acquainted with the agonies of writing. He wrote like he thought. He sketched out the characters quickly, adventures would pop up in his mind and the plots, which were all alike, would begin to take shape. He would have loved to plumb the depths of souls a little longer and a little deeper, but after a few weeks he had always come to the conclusion that he’d exhausted all of his material. In the end, they were all invariably similar to one another: short stories about single-minded passions, irrepressible loves and macabre consequences. Everything was irremediably greedy and exuberant—in other words, the complete opposite of his own character. His work lit a succession of conflagrations in the hearts of his heroes, who would throw themselves head first into the flames while he burned on the inside. Indeed, when it came to the subjects of his stories, it was always the same old tune. The characters would attempt to resist their passions and once they relented and gave in to them, their guilty consciences prompted them either to turn their backs on life or to lapse into madness. As far as he was concerned, his work was governed by an overly simplistic mechanism: the fires of passion and the flames of hell. He reproached himself for never having scratched past the emotional surface of things, of never having struck the right tone,
yes, that’s right, that was the reason he’d never been able to write anything but short stories. He’d never had the courage to plumb the depths of his characters. He had never accomplished the feat of narrating an entire life. He’d never written a masterpiece, a voluminous, heavy novel, something both dense and pacey, like
Berlin Alexanderplatz
and
The Magic Mountain
… Klaus Mann and Ernst Weiss had been right to mock him. He was nothing but a minor writer, a dilettante, a mundane chronicler, an inveterate bourgeois who hadn’t suffered for his art. As for his current heroes, the chess players, he still had no idea of what would happen to them, but Dr B. would undoubtedly discover the destinies of all the other characters would lead to either death or suicide.

One evening, Feder had confided in him: “Well, I’ve lost my house, my country, my newspaper and I don’t know whether most of my family has managed to find a safe haven, but I’ve got a good reason to be satisfied with my condition: imagine the book I’ll be able to write once all this is over. I picture it as a sort of
Robinson Crusoe
, but one that speaks to the German-Jewish experience and is told through the eyes of Friday. Yes, I’ll be Friday, and since the fate of Jews everywhere is hanging in the balance, I’ll call myself Saturday, yes, Sabbath will be my pseudonym, an illustrious, holy name. I will be Sabbath and I will live on an island alongside the great Crusozweig. My book will tell the story of this Crusozweig, alone in the middle of the jungle. Put your mind at ease, I’m not taking any notes. I’ve inscribed everything on my memory. I can see the title on the jacket cover:
Five Years with Stefan Zweig
—yes, I share your natural optimism, of course the war won’t be over until 1946 or 1947. I’ve already got the climax in mind, it will be a chapter called ‘The Day that Zweig Smiled’. But the chapter entitled ‘The Day Zweig Shed a Tear’ will also be good… We’ll
hit the lecture circuit. You’ll stand beside me and all you’ll have to do is nod your head. My book will cast the spotlight on you. I will reveal that you are in fact quite a jolly man, always up for a laugh, easy to get on with, that you see life through rose-tinted glasses and that you want nothing out of life other than to smoke a fine cigar. Yes, I, Ernst Feder, will be the biographer of the man who will become the first Jewish Nobel laureate as soon as the war is over! Fine, I forgot about Bergson, but was Bergson really a writer?…”

Feder was being sarcastic of course. He was well acquainted with Stefan’s novels and his comments had always provided welcome encouragement. With a trusted reader like Feder, he felt himself becoming a writer again, in short, he finally felt like himself again. He rediscovered his identity. He was able to escape the punishment of exile.

“What I really like about you,” Feder explained, “is your Freudian undertone. Exactly, Freudian. You’re not a storyteller. You use a narrator to give an account and this narrator interacts with an outsider, who in turns hears the narrator’s confession. You have taken the technique of the embedded narrative to unparalleled heights. You have invented the literary
psychoanalytical
novel. You are Freud’s alter ego, not Schnitzler. As far as I’m concerned, what’s really interesting about your books is the relationship between the narrator and the interlocutor. I’m fascinated more by this confessor than by your heroes, this being who remains in the shadows and who never passes judgement. Unlike most writers, you’re never the hero of your own books. Your ‘I’ is like a ghost inside this being who is the repository of all the world’s miseries… Your novels won’t be remembered for the way they evoke the world of yesterday, that dear forgotten world of yours, but as the chronicle of a carnage. You’re fooling yourself if you hope to be remembered as the master storyteller
of the old gilt days or the great bard of nostalgia. The characters in your books are a testament to the destruction of the world… and please forgive my bluntness here but your heroes only ever talk about your own wound and they chronicle every stage of your long downward spiral. You shy away from activism, refuse to sign our petitions or fight with the exile organizations, you once even placed your hopes in Chamberlain, which goes to show, doesn’t it? But your fight lies elsewhere, you’re engaged in documenting the destruction of the world. You had so assimilated yourself into that Viennese world, that dear departed Mitteleuropean culture, that when the Nazis destroyed it, you got torn apart in the process. What you describe, as though you’d foreseen it, and what your books express, through the madness of your heroes, is the story of your own annihilation—and this story is so intense and candid, your writing is so painstaking and crisp, that your work and your personality have blended seamlessly into one. Your characters never stood a chance. They were doomed as soon as they opened their mouths or exchanged a first glance with someone. You lead them to the place where you have spent the entirety of your life… under the rubble. I don’t know whether this is a divine gift or a hellish curse. The Nazis are the embodiment of evil, while you’re catastrophe personified. You’re the writer of disaster… All right, now where was I? You moved your bishop to d6, didn’t you?… So I’ll move my queen to c7. I’ve got one word for you: checkmate!”

Lotte was running down Avenida Koeler, blue in the face. Whenever she found herself gasping for air, she would put down her basket loaded with fruit and vegetables at the foot of a tree.
Let the children help themselves to it! Let them throw a street party in the city square! Let the women wear their jewels and the men crack open bottles of champagne! This day was a great day. This day would be remembered for ever as the most celebrated day in the history of mankind. Light had come back to earth. God had broken through the silence. America was entering the war! She had just heard the news. The historic event was on the front pages of all the dailies featured in the news-stand on the market square. She had read and reread all the headlines to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating. The news-stand owner had assured her she wasn’t dreaming: Roosevelt had declared war on Germany and Japan. Tremble with fear Hitler, your days are numbered!

In a month’s time, the Flying Fortresses she had seen on the newsreels would descend on Europe. Armadas of ships would unleash millions of GIs on the beaches of the Atlantic coast. The soldiers of Liberty would have the German butchers for breakfast! The forces of Good would vanquish the demons. They were saved! Jews would be celebrating this day in Katowice, Frankfurt and Vienna, singing hymns to the Lord! Their ordeal had come to an end. America had reached out its hand to the damned. Quick, she had to give Stefan the news! He wouldn’t have heard it. He had recently decided to stop reading newspapers and listening to the radio. He could no longer put up with the bulletins of tragedies and catastrophes getting in the way of his work. He had sequestered himself. But he had started writing again. He had finished his
Montaigne
, had just put the finishing touches on his story about chess players and had begun a novel whose heroine was called Clarissa—Clarissa, what an odd idea! He had come to terms with the madness of men. But today the tide had finally turned. A new era had been ushered in. The time of solitude and chaos was a thing of the past. Tomorrow,
Brazil would rally around the United States and men throughout the Americas would enlist and board ships destined for Europe. Victories would come thick and fast and entire populations would rise up and rebel against the German butchers. The troops of the Reich would desert en masse. It was 1941 and the war was over! In two months’ time, soldiers would cross the Rhine. In three, they would lay siege to Vienna and Frankfurt. Berlin would fall into the hands of the Allies. Yes, by July 1942 crowds of ecstatic Jews would dance the old Jewish dances around the soldiers and sing hymns to the Lord and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, may God bless that saintly man. They were saved! Next year in Vienna! Yes, she would walk along the Ring arm in arm with her husband. They would be welcomed at the Central Station in Vienna by a horde of journalists. A flurry of camera flashes. “Mr and Mrs Zweig have arrived in Vienna,” the photo captions would read. “Above, Mrs Lotte Zweig joins her husband at the Beethoven Café.” For the first time, they would walk side by side down the pathways of the Schönbrunn garden. Make their rounds through the Prater’s park. She would walk up the steps of the Burgtheater leaning on his arm. In order to celebrate the return of the city’s prodigal son, the mayor would decide to schedule a new performance of
Jeremiah
. During the premiere, the audience would give him a standing ovation, applauding the author as he walked onto the stage… alongside his young wife. They would sleep in the royal suite at the Hotel Continental. They would dine at Sluka. Then they would treat themselves to
Sachertorte
at Demel. Walking past the bookshops on the Burggasse, they would spot Stefan Zweig’s books in prominent places on all the shelves. Men would tip their hats in the street. They would express delight at their return. They had waited too long to do so—and why had they even left in the first place? Had Vienna ever stopped being the city of lights?