Two days later, they had received a missive from the council. Tearing the envelope open, thinking it was the mayor sending him his best wishes, he instead saw that it bore the letterhead of the Foreign Office, informing him that he had been designated an “enemy alien”. The British declaration of war on the Reich had made him a potential enemy of the Crown. An attached letter informed him of his rights and responsibilities. Mr Stefan Zweig was to be confined to house arrest, and allowed to roam free within a five-mile radius of his home. Breaching those conditions would result in criminal charges. Each time he wanted to go abroad, he would need to ask permission. He was forbidden to pass political comments on the situation. He would have to register with the council in person once a week. “They forgot to tell me to wear a yellow star,” he had reacted. Hitler’s soldiers had threatened him with death, Goebbels had put him in Category 1 of “undesirable and pernicious” writers. The Foreign Office had labelled him a Class B “enemy alien”. He had missed out on Class A, which would have meant imprisonment! In London, he was an enemy and a stranger. As the Germans had summed up, a Juden, so the author of Mary Stuart was an enemy of the British Crown? What were they afraid of? That Stefan Zweig would launch an attack on 10 Downing Street? Had Freud, his mentor and friend, received a similar letter from the Foreign Office before his death? Was Freud a Class B, an enemy alien? Freud had happily preferred to leave this world behind, in his own manner, at a time of his own choosing.
Vermin in Germany, they were now lepers in Great Britain.
He had moved to London in 1934, choosing the latter over Paris, whose political climate was too unstable thanks to its cabals and factions. He had gone to London to make a break with Austria. He had put down his suitcases believing it was as if he’d surrendered his weapons. He’d hoped the distance would put him beyond the reach of those demons. Yet the demons had followed him, crossing the Continent and the Channel, where they had started haunting the island. The Devil had taken up residence in his very soul.
He had put himself out of harm’s way while they tortured his friends in Dachau. With each passing month, the Reich built another step for the gallows. When he’d first arrived in London, he’d lived in an apartment on Hallam Street. He had then moved to the smaller town of Bath, in the vicinity of Bristol. Following five long years of exile, he had obtained a passport thanks to the intervention of Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells—and when he had finally become a British citizen, war had been declared on Germany. As a result, people started seeing spies around every street corner. It became inadvisable to be heard speaking German. Suspicion weighed heavily on the exiles. On that passport, which he’d won after a protracted struggle, they had added “enemy alien” in black ink. Enemy of the Reich and the British Crown. He had become a pariah. An ardent humanist, Zweig had become an enemy of the human race.
Since he preferred exile over dishonour, he had left London for New York. After that, he had also escaped from New York. Fleeing had been his way of living in the world. Salzburg–London, London–New York, New York–Rio, and, after Rio, where next?
“There weren’t only downsides to living in London,” she smiled.
It was thanks to their London exile that they’d been able to meet. Stefan had settled there in the spring of 1934, whereas she had already been there for a year, having fled Katowice alongside her brother as soon as Hitler had come to power. In a worrying twist of irony, Friderike had introduced them to one another. His wife had insisted that Stefan hire a personal secretary to assist him during the writing of Mary Stuart, after having lost his former secretary, the loyal Anna Meingast. Lotte had kept silent throughout most of the interview. Had he been seduced by her shyness, the allure of her submissiveness and wide-eyed adoration, which Lotte hadn’t been able to conceal? She had only been twenty-five years old, whereas he had been in his early fifties.
As soon they’d laid eyes on one another, Friderike had been under no illusions. Yet she hadn’t become suspicious. Throughout the many years she’d lived with the writer, she’d seen a great number of mistresses come and go. She had resigned herself to being married to a philanderer. She only demanded a little discretion. She demanded silence. With Lotte, however, things had taken an unexpected turn.
The three of them had met the previous summer at the Hôtel Westminster along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Lotte had taken a room next to the married couple’s. They had spent a month there during the summer of 1934 with Joseph Roth and Jules Romains. They had attended a concert given by their friend Toscanini at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo and taken long leisurely walks up and down the Grande Corniche. One morning in July, Friderike had gone to the consulate to see about her visa and had returned a little earlier than expected. Like a character in a bad play, she had surprised her husband and his secretary holding hands on the balcony.
A woman crossed the dining room of the Hotel Solar do Império with a spring in her step. Her hair was short and a little grizzled. She was wearing beige flannel trousers and a black shirt. Stefan could not avoid watching her silhouette glide between the tables.
“She bears a slight resemblance to Friderike,” Lotte calmly commented.
He denied it.
“Yes, something about her presence. Your wife cut quite an appearance.”
He retorted that she was now his wife.
“Do you miss her sometimes?”
He shook his head.
“I’m certain you miss her, or that you’re going to miss her. Maybe we shouldn’t have left New York.”
He remembered the last time he’d seen Friderike, and strange as it might seem, that encounter had happened purely by chance. They had found themselves face to face in an office on Fifth Avenue, where both parties had come to fill in their visa applications. It had been months since they’d last seen one another. He had wanted to embrace her, but hadn’t given in to his desire. He had cut the emotional outpourings short. He hated effusiveness. Was this chance encounter a sign? Were those implausible reunions just before their departure for Rio meant to make him give up his plans and stay in New York with Alma and Franz Werfel, with Thomas Mann and Jules Romains? To dwell among his people?
The waiter served the main course. They’d run out of duck with blackberry sauce and so the chef had made him a bobó de camarão. Stefan reacted indifferently. Lotte turned to the waiter and said:
“It’s nothing serious you know, he’s never been able to make up his mind.”
He started reminiscing about the old days. He loved to tell stories about the early hours of the new century, when he’d been a twenty-year-old in Vienna. He knew that she’d always found his anecdotes entrancing. It seemed like time travel to her, allowing her to think she too had been twenty and by his side. Sometimes, when he wasn’t in the mood, she would insist:
“Tell me one of your stories. I love it when you talk about yourself, you’re such a good storyteller. I want to know everything about you. The present and the past. I want to have been a spectator to every second of your life. I want to be you, to stand by your side, I want to have been there, at the Café Beethoven, the Burgtheater, to stroll with you in the Volksgarten, to admire Maximiliansplatz, to mount the steps of the Opera next to you, to breathe the air of Marienbad. Destiny decided I was to be born much too late, so I want to make up for lost time, I want to know all about those years when we were apart—tell me!”
He would begin to evoke the highlights of his life. The sound of waltzes would start to resound in Lotte’s soul. Fans would start to flutter as young ladies with gloved hands and wonderful dresses leant on the arms of Imperial Army officers, dressed in their white uniforms, their chests studded with bright medals. Hearing his story, she would find herself arm in arm with him in the ballroom of the Hofburg Palace. The young couples in front of them swayed to the rhythm of the music. There were paintings by Klimt on the walls next to the portraits of the Emperor Franz Josef. Huge chandeliers burst into showers of light. She listened to him, dumbstruck, guided by hi
s speech. They danced around his words. They relished being together, just the two of them. She heard a word slip past his lips which she’d never hitherto heard him say, and which he never said without feeling doubtful. He never said “I love you”, never promised they’d spend their whole lives together, that their love was greater than all others before it; he had never expressed the wish that a child might spring forth from her loins, a son that would bear his name, Zweig, who would be the son of Stefan Zweig and Elizabeth Charlotte Altmann, grandson of Moriz and Ida Zweig and Arthur Salomon and Sarah Eva Altmann.
All of a sudden, it was as if night had fallen outside. A swarm of black and grey clouds obscured the sky. The horizon was striped with lightning. The thunder roared. After that, the rain fell in a great crash. He told her not to be afraid. She replied that she feared nothing so long as she was by his side.
She cared little about the rain and the thunder. Her womb was still sterile. She would never feel a baby’s shrieking on her breast, she would never cradle him sweetly in her arms. The horizon faded into the earth. He picked up his story where he’d left off. She was no longer listening to him. Her mind was elsewhere. She thought about Eva on New York’s streets. After a few minutes, the downpour came to an end. The waiter brought over the bill. Just as quickly as it had blackened, the sky was restored to an azure blue.
They left the palace. He hailed the man at his post in front of the hotel, who was holding the reins of a two-horse carriage. They started back.
OCTOBER
HE GOT OUT OF BED slowly and quietly, taking care not to wake her. Once on his feet, he contemplated his features, his wrinkle-free face, bright as an opal, his long eyelashes and his wavy locks, which fell to the nape of his neck. Lotte was sleeping on her side, her right arm folded towards the corner of a pillow, as if she’d been looking for a shoulder to lie on. He admired her slender wrist, adorned by a gold bracelet he’d given her the previous night. Her body was only half-covered and her nightshirt allowed him to glimpse a figure that hadn’t lost any of its sensuality despite all the privations of exile. Her chest rose at intervals that seemed a little too close together, but her breathing was regular. For the past two weeks she had slept soundly. Her illness was kept at bay.
That place was paradise. When he woke in the middle of the night, he saw her fast asleep and breathing peacefully. The asthma attacks were a distant memory now. This place brought people back from the dead.
He felt safe. It was just a shame there were newspapers keeping him in touch with developments around the world. There was also the radio, and he understood Portuguese. Then there were letters from fellow exiles, who, having just left Europe, had sent him reports that prophesied a coming doomsday. Blood oozed from their lips.
He left the room, shut the door behind him, crossed the corridor, walked right up to the veranda and, standing behind the window, gazed at the sweeping vista that stretched before him. The valley to the west was steeped in fog. A white-satin veil hung over the maize plantations, which were lit by a few reddish hearths. The city’s houses were wrapped in a thick mist. He opened the window and filled his lungs with the sweetly scented air. The sun rose above the mountain. Everything turned crimson. Soon enough, his eyes could no longer bear the intensity of the light. He went back into the lounge and sat down in a rocking chair.
He hadn’t slept a wink that night. Even less than usual. Sleep had already eluded him for a long time. He had left his dreams behind in Austria. At night, he met with his lost loved ones. All his dear departed reached out to him from the afterlife to pay him a visit. The guests queued at his door. They talked about the rain and fine weather, they shared their foolish hopes, broke down into tears and laughed heartily.
He preferred night to day, when he would hear the voices of his nearest and dearest, even when not in bed. Regardless, he would never again hear his mother’s sweet tone, or Joseph Roth’s complaints, or experience Rathenau’s friendly smugness, Schnitzler’s melancholic smile, Rilke’s enthusiasm or Freud’s stern looks. The faces of loved ones peered out of the penumbra of the night. They were timeless moments. Sadly, the first streaks of dawn scattered their images, snuffing out their murmurs and laughter, putting an end to the past, to people, to life. Everything reverted to stony silence. Preferring the company of ghosts, he began to be frightened by the living.
His lids never closed, his eyes stayed wide open. The sleepless nights unlocked inaccessible worlds, throwing open the doors of the past. He found himself walking backwards on a bridge suspended over a misty emptiness populated by familiar faces. He didn’t regret his sleeplessness in the slightest. Nevertheless, his insomnia began to alter his perception of reality. He counted the moments until dusk. Ghosts invited themselves along even during the day while he was in the midst of the living. He had to restrain himself from greeting them. He was afraid people would think he’d lost his mind.
That night, Joseph Roth had dropped in for a chat. Roth had been his most assiduous visitor. A bold, wretched fighter, a pathetic and glorious warrior of words. Roth was the best man among them. Neither he, Thomas Mann nor Werfel would ever be capable of writing a single chapter that had both the power and the magnitude of The Radetzky March. He admired the writer, the fighter, the man who threw himself head first into every struggle. He envied Roth’s despondency as much as his genius. Roth had lingered in Vienna until the last moment. Roth had fought, Roth wasn’t a coward who had holed up in the mountains of Amazonia. Stefan had envied Roth’s beginnings as well as his end. Roth had stood his ground alone, his body ravaged by absinthe, in the face of the proud, invincible soldiers pouring out of Germany. For months on end, Roth had staggered down the steps of his hotel on the Rue de Tournon, holding on to futile hopes fuelled by his drunkenness, declaring he was off to fight the armies of the Reich that were howling at France’s door. A man with a thirst for divine grace and cheap wine had braved the tidal wave of organized savagery. In his newspaper columns, lectures and meetings with French politicians—and even Chancellor Schuschnigg himself—Roth had fought against the Anschluss right up to the moment when the Germans marched into Vienna. In the meanwhile, Stefan hadn’t dared sign the slightest petition or pen the briefest article. He had been paralysed by the repercussions his words might incur. Germans were plunging their spikes deep into the bellies of Jews and he hadn’t dared to speak out lest it wound up being interpreted as a provocation. He had brought shame on himself. He had never stopped supporting Roth, had even invited the writer to join him in Britain and accompany him to the United States, and had sent him money orders every three months. Friderike had looked after him in Paris, helping him up the steps of the hotel on Rue de Tournon, propping up a man who was digging himself a grave with alcohol. One day, floored by the news of Ernst Toller’s suicide in New York, Roth had died. The previous night, Friderike and Soma Morgenstern had had him moved to the Necker Hospital. On the other hand, Stefan hadn’t even had the courage to come down from London to attend the funeral service.
Roth had reappeared that night. He had slid past the curtains and sat down next to the bed. He was holding a glass in his hand and was pouring himself large whiskies while his body trembled from tip to toe. On that night, the writer had come to enquire after his wife’s health. Roth’s wife, a schizophrenic, was also called Friederike.
“Is it true what the exiles are saying?” Roth had asked him.
Carried by a doom-laden voice that had risen out of the depths of the netherworld, Stefan had heard a rumour louder than all the war drums. He hadn’t believed his ears. Could it be that such terror, suffering, savagery, hate and inhumanity had rained down on a single human being, especially one as innocent as Friederike Roth, one whose mind had been torn to shreds ever since she’d fallen prey to madness in 1929? Had the German monsters really done what people were accusing them of? Had they really euthanized poor Friederike? Roth’s body shook with painful and protracted tremors.
“No, it’s not true,” Zweig had murmured, �
��you shouldn’t believe everything doomsayers tell you. They have a tendency to make horrors sound even more horrible. You know how Germans are, they are capable of the worst, but would they go to such extremes? What would they care about hunting down and overpowering such a lost, simple soul in the grips of madness? Germans extol the virtues of warriors, and celebrate the rights of the strong over the weak. Do you think that the Germans would detract their attention from the conquest of the world to chase after someone as poor and weak as Friederike Roth? Rest in peace, my dear Roth, in your world of tranquillity, goodness and solicitude, our promised land.”
“You’ve put my mind at ease,” Roth had whispered. “Is there any news of her then other than these abject lies?”
“My dear Joseph, have no fear, they were able to rescue your wife. She’s doing well. She’s in Switzerland, we helped her cross the border and she is safe from those demons coming out of Germany, as well as the ones haunting her soul. A psychiatrist is looking after her in a Geneva clinic.”
“Good thing she’s in Switzerland, she’ll be all right. Blessed are the Swiss who take us in and dress our wounds. Do you know the doctor’s name?”
“Yes, it’s Alfred Döblin, our dear Alfred, that great physician, that renowned writer, the one who looked after her in Berlin and referred her to Dr Bernstein, a disciple of Freud, and who looks after those of us who’ve lost their minds down here.”
“If he’s a disciple of Freud, then she’s saved.”
Then they had talked about their work.
“One day,” Roth’s voice had said, “you’re going to read my latest novella, you’re going to like it, it’s written in your style, and I think I’m going to call it Job. What about you? Are you writing? We must write, we must write books that are flame-proof.”
The Last Days Page 4