The driver stopped the car in front of the hotel entrance, asked for his fare, got out and went to open Lotte’s door, wished them a happy stay and bid them goodbye. They lingered in a sort of daze in front of the hotel’s marquee, standing still as a warm wind blew in from the sea. Their eyes followed the taxi as it drove back into the fray. They exchanged a silent look, feeling stunned and outraged. They stepped into the hotel, walking slowly, their arms linked, looking as uncertain and awkward as if they’d just walked away from a road accident, unscathed but groggy. They crossed the grand lobby, whose walls were decorated with reproductions of Otto Kirchner’s portraits. There were a few men in suits working their way through a bottle while sitting on white leather sofas. Their voices blended into an indiscernible tangle. Stefan and Lotte gave their names at reception and asked for Abrahão Koogan, the man they were due to meet. An employee pointed them in the direction of the terrace, where Koogan was expecting them.
They had barely set foot outside when they felt as though they’d been blinded by the light, a burning brightness that flooded over everything and seemed to rise out of the ocean and solidify in the atmosphere. Warm voices and hearty laughter resounded under the taut white canvas awnings, which were being gently stirred by the wind. It was like standing on the deck of a sailing boat. Abrahão Koogan, the Brazilian publisher, was sitting alone at a table, dressed in white, with a Super Fino Montecristi on his head. Koogan got up and greeted them effusively. They embraced warmly.
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 go
t up. He shook Koogan’s hand and left.
NOVEMBER
EVERY 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:
When I think of Germany at night,
It puts all thought of sleep to flight.
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.
The Last Days Page 6