Happily, he had been able to safeguard the original score of Mozart’s Das Veilchen. It had crossed the ocean with him. Mozart’s eyes and hands had lain on these pages. How often had he attended recitals of this song, to which Goethe’s words had been set? He began to hum that tune and its lyrics. It was the first time he’d sung in ages. The spirit of the old Austria had survived in this place. Mozart watched over him.
His entire life rested upon these shelves. It was framed by its planks.
Nothing was left of the books that he’d kept in his Salzburg house. The people who had written them, those that were still alive, were now scattered throughout the world, fleeing wherever they could, hounded and miserable, penniless and devoid of inspiration, no longer able to tell their stories. Who could start a novel in those times, or weave a more solid and dramatic plot than that which was already being written? Hitler was the author of millions of unsurpassable tragedies. Literature had found its true master.
He pondered over the ridiculous direction his destiny as a writer had taken. Now he only wrote in order to be translated—into English, thanks to that good-hearted Ben Huebsch at Viking Press, and into Portuguese, by Abrahão Koogan. For nearly a decade now, German publishing houses had stopped printing works by Jews—not even Insel Verlag, to whom he’d been steadfastly loyal. He wrote using the language of a people who had outlawed him. Could one be a writer if he weren’t read in his own language? Was he still alive even though he was unable to write about his times?
He had been the most widely read author in the world, even though he was convinced that he was far less talented than Thomas Mann, or Schnitzler, or Rilke, or, of course, even Joseph Roth—and he didn’t believe a single word of what Freud had said when he’d claimed to prefer his work over Dostoevsky’s. He was aware of his weak points, was irked by his novellas’ repetitive plots, that limited technique of storytelling that he seemed unable to get away from—or the irremediably tragic way in which his heroes and heroines achieved their destiny either through madness or death. He had sold sixty million books. He had been translated into almost thirty languages, from Russian and Chinese all the way to Sanskrit. His biographies could be found in libraries all over France, Russia, the United States and Argentina. Crowds rushed to see films adapted from his stories. He had written librettos for Richard Strauss. His Jeremiah at the Burgtheater had been highly acclaimed. Five hundred theatres had staged productions of his Volpone. He had delivered the keynote eulogy in memory of Rilke, his friend, at the Staatstheater in Munich, presided over the opening of the Tolstoy House Museum in Moscow and preached the sermon at Freud’s funeral in London. He had encouraged Herman Hesse’s first literary efforts, and, were it not for not for his help, Joseph Roth might never have climbed out of the pit of his despair and written The Radetzky March. The great Einstein himself had asked to meet with him. He cherished his memory of their dinner at a Berlin restaurant in June 1930, where the scientist had confessed to owning all of his books.
His books haunted him. Their characters—Mrs C. and Dr B., Christine and Ferdinand, Irene, Roland and Edgar—lived on in his spirit. He thought about their fate. The sight of bonfires being kindled in the squares of each German town on that menacing night of 10th May 1933 flashed past his eyes once again. With those crowds huddling around those blazing fires one might have thought one were back in the Middle Ages. The Reich that wanted to last for a thousand years had instead turned the clock back to the year 1000. Once night had fallen and the bonfire was glowing, the ghastly street party had got under way as German youths, cheered on by the crowd, had thrown books into the pyre. The flames had climbed all the way to the sky and the ashes had scattered into the night. The heroes of his novels had been burnt to a crisp.
The sound of Lotte’s footsteps in the corridor stopped the train of his dark thoughts in its tracks. Did he want to come and take his seat at the dinner table? Mrs Banfield had asked the kitchen to prepare a Brazilian speciality in their honour. Lotte headed to the window, explaining how one shouldn’t sit in the dark. She opened the blinds to their fullest. A wave of light spread through the room. He told Lotte the journey had given him an appetite.
The housekeeper had set the table out on the veranda. In the sky, the seams between night and day had blurred. The air was cooler. Lotte rose from her chair to look for a shawl. They started eating. In her sweet husky voice, she said:
“You know, I think we can finally hang those Rembrandt etchings of yours. They will look splendid in the salon.”
Alongside his Mozart score, he had also been able to bring two little etchings signed by the master himself. All of his other Rembrandts, as well as his Klimts, his Schieles, his Munch, his Kokoschkas and his little Renoir, were now undoubtedly hanging on the walls of Goering’s house. He contemplated that enchanted, timeless landscape outside, banishing the ghosts that haunted his spirit, if only for a few seconds. The distant echo of military marches was supplanted by the sound of animal calls—monkeys, he assumed. In the eight years since he’d fled from Salzburg, he’d been searching for peace. Yet every time he’d set down his suitcases, the ground had crumbled beneath his feet. Everywhere he went, the war had caught up with him. He hoped it would never get past those hills. He had found the ideal spot for his eternal rest.
“You can finally get down to work on your Balzac.”
He nodded. The time had come.
Now that he was here, he felt ready. That biography of Balzac he’d begun writing in London was to be his masterpiece. It had to be important, bulky, and would put paid to those criticisms regarding his style. His friends—Klaus Mann, Ernst Weiss, the late lamented Ernst—had never spared him, accusing him of plagiarism and dilettantism. His Balzac, however, would command respect; it would be more meticulous than Marie Antoinette and more ambitious than Mary Stuart. It would stand as a testament to his work ethic and unwavering discipline. It would erase all trace of his mediocre and laughable Stendhal. Balzac would be his finest achievement. The novelist had been both his mentor and model. Balzac’s industriousness and rich abundance of characters fascinated him. He had already written the first part of the book, which dealt with the French writer’s life, in London. Yet he wanted to give this book a different spin. He aspired towards an exhaustive examination of Balzac’s work, its structure, its essence, something that would encompass the entirety of The Human Comedy and remain a useful reference to it. During his five years in London, he had accumulated an incredible wealth of material. Alas, he hadn’t been able to find room for it in his baggage. Thousands of files and notes, without which he could not continue his work, were gathering dust in a box on the other side of the world. His friend Ben Huebsch had assured him that this precious package would before long leave London, and that a transatlantic ship would deliver it to Rio soon enough. Though he never usually prayed, he began pleading with the Heavens that the ship might reach safe harbour. The Balzac had become his reason for being.
“You’re wrong,” Lotte said, “you’ve got nothing to prove. No one stands your equal. Your Balzac isn’t the only thing you have. Here I am, right by your side. Am I not worth living for?”
He acquiesced. Yes, she was more important to him than anything else. She was worth more than all the books he had written and those yet to come, more than all the novels that had ever been published. She planted a kiss on his hand. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She explained that they were of joy, caused by the happiness she felt at seeing the two of them together in a house far from the reach of men, all alone. Perhaps it had been their destiny all along to be forced onto the path of exile so that they might find one another, far from barbarians and their oaths, sheltered behind a mountain range and buffered by a vast ocean.
He would have loved to believe in destiny, to think that this voyage had been guided by a higher will. Yet he had never believed in God. He felt as though he’d left the keys to his fate in the lock of his house in Salzburg.
*
On the morning of th
e second day, a beam of light cut through the bedroom blinds and curtains. He partly opened his eyelids. Whereas he had usually needed a few minutes before mustering his energies in the past, he got out of bed immediately. The housekeeper, a friendly young lady whom Mrs Banfield had put at their disposal, made him some coffee, and he drank it sitting on the veranda. Although he had stopped dreaming long ago, it was so bright outside that he seemed to have slipped into reverie.
Lotte got up not long after him. When she came out onto the veranda, the sun cast a beam of light on her. She said she’d been woken up by the sound of birdsong: a primeval sort of choir, the likes of which she’d never heard before. “A tropical symphony,” she said, smiling. His thoughts drifted to his friend Toscanini when he’d conducted Pastoral in Monte Carlo in 1934. But he didn’t linger on these memories. He wanted to make a clean break with the past. Petrópolis had to clear all that dross and nostalgia from his mind.
Lotte had slept well. Her face said it all. Up until that point, the miles they’d travelled had seriously compromised her health. Her condition had worsened in the past few months. The ocean crossing had hollowed her cheeks, damaged her eyesight and chapped her lips. Lotte’s heart hadn’t coped well with London weather. After they’d left Britain, Lotte’s lungs had rejected the New York air during their stopover in that city. That was part of the reason they’d headed farther south. The first time they’d gone to Brazil, a year earlier, the weather in Petrópolis’s hilly heights had proved restorative. It was as if they’d gone to the Austrian Alps, to Semmering, Baden or some other spa town.
It had been a long time since her medication had had any effect on her asthma. Every night, around two o’clock in the morning, Stefan had been forced to look on, powerless, as his young wife gasped for air, hovering on the brink of asphyxiation, sitting on the window sill and looking as though she had wanted to breathe all the world’s air into her lungs. The continents they’d travelled through, the succession of hotel rooms and the endless uncertainties had accentuated her illness. Just as they had lacked for space throughout their exile, clean air had also been in short supply. Air had been a precious commodity for her. Now they had nowhere left to hide and their finances had run dry. They were even running out of oxygen.
They decided to go out to lunch. Lotte was wearing the beige silk dress she’d purchased in New York the previous month, a few days before they’d boarded the ship for Brazil. They had been living at the Wyndham Hotel on 25th Street, a corner of tranquillity they’d grown very fond of. America had initially looked welcoming. A second life in the New World. They had landed in New York at the end of June 1940, while the Britain they’d left behind was collapsing under the brunt of the German bombing raids. They had enjoyed a few days of happiness, but they had once again had to apply for visas, filling in a great number of forms, asking for references, simply to prove they had the right to exist, even to be there, living in the midst of constant uncertainty and temporary solutions. America hadn’t really turned out to be the promised land everyone claimed it was. The more Lotte’s asthma worsened, the more their liveliness was sapped. She started having coughing fits. At night, doctors would be at her bedside injecting drugs into her veins. Unfortunately, all that New York air wasn’t clean enough for her lungs. Or maybe all the wind stopped at the city limits. Or the breeze that blew over the Hudson was too weak. Or it was all too late and there wasn’t any hope left for her. She had contracted that terrible influenza. The fever had made her lose her mind. They had thought she’d been at death’s door. He’d spent a whole night nestled by her side on that hospital bed. When she had regained consciousness, she’d heard him mutter some words—but maybe her fever was making her hallucinate? He’d spoken into the abyss, stricken with grief. Her lips had trembled. She’d sworn he’d been addressing the dead, entreating them, telling them about his regrets. He felt remorse for having dragged his wife along on this escapade. His muttering had soothed her. She had fallen asleep lulled by the sound of his voice. After a few days, the fever had calmed down and she no longer wheezed like a coffee pot. Warmth flowed back into her fingertips. She was cured. Those frightening weeks had furnished them with ultimate proof that they didn’t belong in New York.
It was a shame as she would have gladly stayed, even though the weather didn’t do her any good, even though the lethargy of urban life and car pollution were asphyxiating her. Manhattan was enchanting. At the end of a night’s coughing fit, she had seen the city stir and spring to life by the light of dawn through her hotel window. She had gone down to the street. Walking past those skyscrapers had given her vertigo. Everything looked intensely romantic. The streets pulsed with power and a feeling of the unreal. The men and women who crossed her path looked like a new type of human being, one that inspired admiration. In the thick of those crowds, behind those tall walls, she’d imagined herself as the lead actress in a film, a colour film whose images superimposed themselves on the black scenes of that German film. She’d loved losing herself in the crowds on Fifth Avenue at closing time, when employees filed out of their offices—even though she still nursed the terrifying memory of those organized German masses and their outstretched arms. She had strolled through Central Park. The shadows cast by those towers didn’t frighten her in the slightest. When a ray of light would slide between two buildings, she would tell herself that the light had fallen from the sky. She would stand still in the middle of the pavement, her head craned up to those heights, her eyes half-shut, wrapped in that celestial brightness. Someone bumped into her. She scurried back to the shadows. She didn’t like anyone touching her. The brutal touch of strangers sent the noise of footsteps on the pavement, the shouting of the uniformed mobs, resonating through her mind, which she believed was just as ill as her body. She took a little sidestep and found herself once again in the light, where the air became lighter, where life became lighter.
In New York, Lotte had met up with Eva, her niece, who was the daughter of Manfred, her brother. Eva and Manfred were all that was left of her family. Her mother, uncles, aunts and cousins had chosen to stay in Frankfurt and Katowice, the town in Silesia where Lotte was from and which she had fled in 1933. She hadn’t heard from any of them in nearly a year. The courier must not have got through, Stefan had argued.
Lotte had seen her mother staring at her out of Eva’s eyes. The resemblance was striking. According to tradition, granddaughters bore their grandmother’s names. When Lotte had walked through the streets of Brooklyn with Eva, it had been as if she’d been strolling arm in arm with her mother around the Jewish quarter in Katowice. The department stores’ window displays, the restaurant patios and cafés had filled the adolescent with wonder and awe. On seeing the happiness of someone she still thought of as a child, Lotte rediscovered a feeling of insouciance. Eva’s peals of laughter effaced the memory of Stefan’s bottomless anguish. She forgot about the endless flow of handwritten pages which Stefan produced as he neared the completion of his autobiography, pages that Lotte would have to type out on an old Remington, some of whose keys were broken, working day after day without ever taking a break. She had worn her eyes out trying to understand each of the writer’s words, querying the meaning behind every deletion and judging whether his constructions were well balanced. She valued her eyesight highly. All that travelling as well as her illness hadn’t prematurely aged them, but the hours she spent reading that manuscript were going to damage them in the long run. Nevertheless, what did she care about her eyesight when all was said and done, so long as she was by his side?
Eva and Lotte had spent one last day together in Manhattan before the couple left for Rio. They had sat down on a restaurant’s patio. Three young Americans lunching at a nearby table had come over to ask if the ladies would care to join them. The episode lasted only a few minutes, but it sent a wave of sensual pleasure rippling through them.
They had gone into a little shop on the corner of 42nd Street and Madison Avenue, a tailor’s emporium whose window displaye
d sumptuous dresses at affordable prices. Lotte had hesitated on the threshold and Eva had dragged her in. Lotte needed a dress for her new life in Brazil. On entering the boutique the tailor, a short, corpulent man who was very elegantly attired, had welcomed them as though they’d been oriental princesses. He had brought them some tea and unwrapped entire collections for them.
“You know, people are wrong not to buy any suits and dresses. They’re going to need them for V-Day. Because we’re going to win, and when I say ‘we’, I mean the ‘People of the Book’. Can the Book-Burning People stand a chance against us?… By the sound of your accent I would say that you’re from… Cologne?… Frankfurt and Katowice? Me, I’m from Stuttgart… And when did you leave behind that dear motherland of ours that devours its children? Thirty-Three—you’re a real oracle aren’t you! I waited until Thirty-Six, and, what’s worse, I left my daughter Gilda there. Her husband didn’t want to leave. He said the situation couldn’t get any worse… what an idiot that Ernst Rosenthal was! My wife had predicted he wouldn’t be a good husband, my dear Masha, may her soul rest in peace, she didn’t survive the journey. Right after Hermann Flechner got here, having left his son behind in Munich, they were all deported out east. East, as if that were a place fit for Jews!? As soon as the war’s over, I’m going to box that Ernst Rosenthal’s ears… You know, in Frankfurt I attended my cousin Rivkah’s wedding in the big synagogue on Börnestrasse… What’s that? Your father was that synagogue’s rabbi? What a small… Here we are in August 1941 in New York and you tell me that your grandfather wed Rivkah and Franz Hesen, may his soul rest in peace. Franz met his end when the SA threw him out of a window in May 1933. Is there really no such thing as fate, madam? I haven’t even asked you your name madam… Zweig… Do you mean to say you’re Mrs Stefan Zweig? Please forgive me, I must sit down, this is all a bit too much for me, first your grandfather officiates at my cousin’s wedding, then you tell me all those books my daughter devours were written by your husband. Forgive me, I must seem a little too joyful considering the dark times we live in, but you should be wary of appearances, I’m no fool, I know all too well what the Reich does to our people, but were I to fall into melancholia, I might as well go ahead and close my shop, and then what would I do with the remainder of my days, without my wife and daughter? Nor am I going to spend all day waiting at Ellis Island, since they have shut the great gates, the gates of the mighty Reich and the gates of America. My daughter won’t stroll into my shop tomorrow. So I stick to dressmaking, but while that’s all well and good, I’m not uncultured, and I can recognize a great writer when I see one, and what’s more I’ve seen a photograph of him in the newspaper. Your husband is a man of rare elegance, please tell him to drop by, you know Max Wurmberg also does menswear, I have pure wool suits that are like the ones the best sewing shops in Berlin used to turn out, not than anyone wants to remember Berlin these days… You know, I only exhibit dresses in my windows because the future belongs to dressmakers, that is if there’s any future for dressmakers at all. I prefer not to think about the future too much, that’s what fooled Ernst Rosenthal… One day or another, the great Roosevelt is finally going to declare war, I only hope that when he does decide to send his troops over, my little Gilda will still be alive. It’s already August 1941, and if he keeps on waiting, I don’t know what part of Poland they’re going to find her in. It’s just that, you see, I would like to be a grandfather, look over here in this box, it’s a coat for the baby, with a brocaded velvet exterior, and cotton jersey on the inside. It’s for my grandson, look, I’ve stitched his name on the sleeves, he’s going to be called Max, just like me, according to our forefathers’ tradition.”
The Last Days Page 2