The Last Days

by Laurent Seksik

  “Have you heard the news?”

  He nodded.

  “Isn’t it a great day?”

  He agreed that it was.

  “I feel like singing and dancing…”

  He told her she was right, that it was a great day. He had also felt elated that morning when Feder had come to bring him the newspaper.

  “But you don’t seem…?”

  Sure, he was happy, but she knew how he was, he’d never been very effusive. She knelt before him, took his hand in hers and kissed it; then, moved to tears, she murmured:

  “We’re saved, isn’t that so? We’re saved…”

  He kissed her fingers, ran his fingers through her hair and grasped her face between his hands. Yes, she was right, they were saved. At which point he asked her if she could leave him alone. He had to work. She got up, dried her tear-drenched face, headed towards the door and left.

  I am cursed, my name is cursed, curse the day I set foot inside that office in London, the office of that great Austrian Writer, that man, that doom-monger, who is incapable of experiencing happiness. I should leave this place, yes, find salvation in escape, but where would I go? He’s led me to this prison where there are creepers instead of bears, he’s carried me off to the other side of the world and I’ve got nowhere to go, no one who’s waiting for me, I am forced to stay here, beside this marble-like being, in this tomb of unhappiness, oh yes, that’s why he’s chosen this place, a necropolis, an imperial city without an empire. I would have loved to live in New York, to stay with Eva, she and I would have danced on this day, right on Fifth Avenue, where all Jews must now be dancing, because this day is a great day, the war is over and the Lord has shown us the way, the Lord will lead us out of Germany just like he led us out of Egypt. Hitler isn’t a more formidable foe than the Pharaoh, our ordeal is at an end, the Lord has forgiven our sins and He once again holds His hand out to His people. Yet Stefan is obviously incapable of rejoicing, since he believes in nothing, neither in God, nor in Roosevelt. Death is Stefan Zweig’s only companion.

  He had kept the truth from her. He hadn’t wanted to inflict the story that Feder had told him that very morning. He hadn’t wanted to spoil her happiness. He would tell her all about it later, or, seeing as she was so fragile, maybe he wouldn’t say anything at all. He needed to protect her. Who knew how she might react? Yes, he had to warn Feder against saying anything—and if they managed to keep it quiet, she would never find out. The newspapers didn’t report those kinds of atrocities.

  Feder had dropped by mid morning carrying a newspaper under his arm.

  “I have some good news and some unimaginably bad news. Let’s start with the good… Here you go, read this… but don’t get ahead of yourself and cheer up too quickly.”

  He had scanned the headlines and had suddenly felt pure and intense joy course through him, a feeling he hadn’t experienced for many years, a feeling that was a mix of drunkenness and relief. This state of emotion must have been clearly visible on his face since Feder had immediately jumped in and said:

  “No, I told you, you’re going to regret getting so excited. Come to your senses and readopt your gloomy disposition because now you’re going to listen to what I have to tell you…”

  Feder had been woken at dawn by a phone call. Albert Seldmann, a spokesman for one of the exile organizations, had rung him from New York. His voice had trembled. He had punctuated his remarks with a recurring phrase:

  “All of this has been verified, you hear me, Ernst, this is the undiluted truth.”

  During the first days of November, they had rounded up hundreds of Jews in each city of the Reich and herded them into big public squares. It had started with the Jews in Hamburg and the following day it had been the turn of those in Frankfurt, Bremen, then Berlin, and finally Vienna and Salzburg. They had marched the Jews to the railway stations, and after all those months of death, privations and humiliations, they had loaded them onto the trains. Once the compartments had been packed full, the trains had started off. They had crossed Germany and occupied Poland and come to a stop in Minsk. The first convoy had arrived on 10th November. All of this has been verified, this is the undiluted truth. A thousand Jews from Hamburg had been dragged to a place where the sign above the entrance had read “Sonderghetto”, which had been specially erected for the ghetto in Minsk. Three days after the thousand Jews from Hamburg had arrived, they had been joined by five thousand more from Frankfurt. All of this has been verified. On 18th November, a convoy from the capital had unloaded its first shipment of Jews from Berlin. That was on the same day that the first Jews from Vienna had also arrived. Three hundred Viennese Jews. In preparation for the coming influx of German Jews, all the Jews had been cleared out of the large ghetto in Minsk in order to make room for all the Reich’s Jews. They had killed ten thousand Jews over the space of five days.

  This is what Albert Seldmann had told him that morning.

  Feder had stopped, fixed his gaze upon his interlocutor, and then resumed:

  “Do you remember that terrible novel of Bettauer’s called The City Without Jews?”

  Zweig replied that he did. The book dated from the 1920s.

  He had picked it up because the author’s name, Bettauer, had reminded him of his mother’s name. He had read the book and hated it. The novel told a story in which Vienna’s inhabitants had expelled the Jews from the city in the name of Aryan purity. It had been an unqualified success and Bettauer had been assassinated two years following its publication.

  “Well, here we are faced with same scenario,” Feder said. “The Reich is going to be cleansed of all its Jews… At this rate, there won’t be a single Jew left in Germany in a year’s time, including Vienna, of course. Can you imagine it? Not a single Jew left in Vienna or Berlin. Not a single Jew left in the whole of Germany. How is it conceivable?”

  Feder stood up, turned on his heels, went away, then came back and broke into sobs in his host’s arms. While he consoled his visitor, Stefan counted the number of relatives he still had in Vienna. Nineteen cousins. Then he spared a thought for Lotte’s grandfather, the rabbi of Frankfurt.

  *

  From that moment on, he spent most of his time at home, sitting behind his makeshift desk and writing, mechanically and uninspired. He wrote like Roth used to drink, joylessly and effortlessly. He was jotting down ideas on a number of loose sheets.

  Compile a yearbook of life in exile over the years 1941 and 1942 that will include a selection of the best work by émigré writers and show they are still productive. A German yearbook with Thomas and Heinrich Mann and an Austrian yearbook with Werfel and Beer-Hofmann. A French yearbook with Maurois, Bernanos, Jules Romains and Pierre Cot. Set up a coordinating committee in New York to be headed by Klaus Mann. Talk it over with Bruno Kreitner.

  He had abandoned work on his Balzac. He would never be up to the task. He had lost all hope that the suitcase full of papers from London would ever reach him. The ship that had been carrying it was undoubtedly lying at the bottom of the ocean, sunk by a German U-boat. Whenever he started on new stories and wrote the first few pages, he quickly tore them up. He vainly hoped to be hit by a lightning bolt of inspiration, something of the euphoria that had once gripped him every time he’d picked up a pen. Nothing sang in his soul any more.

  He’d got worked up about an idea for a new novel, an ambitious project that would encompass the first half of the century and encapsulate an entire epoch, which would talk about the two wars, serve as the equivalent of an autobiography, but of course under the guise of fiction. He had begun writing it a few weeks earlier. The story commenced in 1902. It was narrated by a woman, who was also the novel’s heroine. He was satisfied with the first chapters. Yes, the book held up between 1902 and 1914. Clarissa came across as lively, affectionate, compassionate and integrated. The book was taking shape. The hundred or so pages he’d already written were a promise of things to come.

  Then he suddenly lost his train of thought. His heroi
ne’s characteristics faded away. Clarissa became a stranger to him. Sometimes she came across like Christine, the post-office girl, while at others she resembled Irene, the protagonist of Fear. Soon enough, the novel lost all semblance of a narrative structure. It didn’t look like anything any more. The chapter that covered the year 1919 came to only six pages. The section regarding the following two years amounted to only three… here is how he had described the 1920s:

  These were the dead years for Clarissa. Her child was the only thing she had in the world.

  That was his masterpiece! The same man who had needed fifty thousand words to narrate Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman had now reduced ten years of someone’s life to a couple of sentences. He felt pathetic. He remembered the time when an inexhaustible stream had flowed effortlessly out of him. Worlds had been built and characters brought to life. How easy it had been for him to plumb the depths of their souls! He had looked into their pasts and foretold their futures. When he used to sit at his desk, pick up his pen and watch the miracle occur right in front of his eyes—oh, those moments when dawn would sneak up on him after a night’s work in Salzburg! These days, both his mind and his inkwell had dried up. Words evaded him and his characters slipped from his fingers. A doomsday atmosphere reigned over his inner world. There were no characters left in his mind, no children were born and no women smiled. The heart of mankind had stopped beating. His mind was a mirror image of the world of Jews. A land buried beneath smouldering ashes.

  *

  There was a knock at the door. Lotte ran to answer it, rapt by the idea that a visitor might help dispel the day’s gloominess. She thought she recognized the man standing on the front steps, but she could not recall his name. The man introduced himself. Lotte suddenly felt her spirits sink to new-found depths as she coldly ushered the visitor in and announced him, at which point she vanished into her room. Siegfried Burger, Friderike’s brother, who had been living in exile in Rio for the past few weeks, had come to pay his former brother-in-law a visit.

  She heard the outburst of joy through the door. The pair must have fallen into one another’s arms. Stefan’s voice sounded uncharacteristically happy and enthusiastic. He showered questions upon his visitor, wanting to know how he’d managed to get to Rio. Where had he fled from? Which route had he taken? How had he obtained a visa? Was the visa provisional? Where was he staying in Rio? At which point he broke into a torrent of words and began reminiscing about the past, talking about shared memories, remembering their walks in the Belvedere, receptions at the Hofburg, dinners in town, all the weeks, months and years they’d lived during Vienna’s halcyon days.

  The physical resemblance between brother and sister was shocking. It was as if Friderike was in the next room. Lotte didn’t want to give up without a fight. She went back into the lounge.

  When she stepped into the room, the men didn’t break off their conversation. Her presence didn’t disturb them reminiscing about a past from which she was excluded. She brought them tea and they thanked her, yet however warmly they did so, it seemed as though they were speaking to someone else. They were in Kapuzinerberg now and it was Friderike who was pouring them refreshments. Lotte observed her husband. His face had changed. His disposition had changed. His posture was straight and the tone of his voice was more assertive. He had transformed back into the married man whom she’d met seven years ago. Siegfried Burger had come into the house and Friderike (née Burger) had gained a foothold in the lounge. Siegfried had sat down on the worn leather armchair and Friderike was standing behind him. Lotte felt like a third wheel. Her heart skipped a beat when she heard her husband enquire after his ex-wife. When he asked Siegfried whether he missed his sister, he added in a choked voice that he missed her too. She took a step in the direction of the corridor. Pretending not to have heard Stefan’s question, Siegfried held Lotte back. He announced that he had brought a letter with him that, he said, turning to face her, “will make you happy”. Lotte’s rage subsided. The letter was addressed to “Stefan and Lotte”. Siegfried read it out loud. It began with a protracted passage in which Friderike related how happy she was to be in New York and free at last. How she had narrowly avoided being arrested along with her daughters at the port in Marseilles. She said she felt good in New York. She no longer felt nostalgic about Austria. She had been campaigning for the United States to enter the war on Britain’s side, but these days she spent most of her time at the Bureau of Immigration on Ellis Island. She had regained her faith in the future in that New World, where people looked and spoke to you without hatred. As Siegfried read those sentences out, Lotte noticed a trace of disappointment flicker past Stefan’s eyes. Happy… without him? Siegfried interrupted his reading and, addressing Lotte, said: “This is the part that’s going to interest you…” He resumed reading the letter. Friderike had hosted Eva Altmann—Eva, her niece!—for two weeks, having found her in a youth hostel. Eva and Friderike had had a marvellous time; “that young girl is wonderful,” the letter said. They had gone to Coney Island, strolled along the beach at Long Island where they had taken their first dip in the ocean: “Rest assured, dear Lotte, that I am looking after her and that we will one day experience again those marvellous moments together.” Lotte felt a jolt of happiness. Then she felt a violent pang of pain. Her gaze drifted off to the world outside the window. Evening was fast approaching and a mist was settling over the town and the valley. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from that dismal scene. The image of happy crowds strolling the streets of New York had taken over her mind. Was the world really divided between people who were happy and those who were cursed?

  JANUARY

  THEY LED A PEACEFUL LIFE. Compared to the rising pile of corpses, it was a relatively normal existence. The news of calamities only reached them sporadically. Their fate was sealed and their eyelids were nearly shut. Nothing would ever come and clear the piles of corpses away. They would no longer live in fear. Silence would reign all around them. They had built a lonely world for themselves. Each day, they set themselves the task of forgetting. They no longer listened to the radio, didn’t read the newspapers, avoided their friends and allowed the telephone to ring off the hook. They rarely opened their front door and left their post unopened. They didn’t write any more letters, took no trains and left the house as little as possible. Their entire life played out between those whitewashed walls. It was a closed world, where it was often difficult to breathe and the air felt like dust. They too would revert to dust. They never raised their voices, never lifted their gaze, their souls were no longer familiar with either joy or distress. Their hearts had simply stopped beating. They lived their life as if they were ghosts. Sleep eluded them. The world’s miseries no longer reverberated in their ears. The memory of their loved ones had evaporated. Oblivion was their only companion. They no longer participated in the world. They were no longer Jewish, no longer Austrian, no longer German. They had cheated destiny. Their fortress was impregnable. They had won.

  But one day a rumble would fill the air. Darkness would streak the sky. Sirens would blare out. The earth would be blown apart. Giant aircraft with swastikas on their wings would drop their bombs. The earth would be set ablaze, houses would burn and the streets would be strewn with mangled bodies. Armoured infantry would fire their cannon across Rio’s bay. Thousands of soldiers would spill out of ships and swarm over Copacabana beach. The Wehrmacht would march along the Avenida Rio Branco. The generals would take over city hall. They would post their decrees on the walls of each avenue and those of the favelas. The SS would disperse throughout the city in small detachments looting palaces and homes. The window displays of department stores would be covered with yellow stars. They would order exiles to register with the authorities. They would insist on taking a census of native Jews. They would enact the racial laws. Then the hunting season would start. First they would imprison all the German refugees, after which they would move on to noteworthy local Jews before starting to round up families. Black-
shirted men with machine guns in hand and rabid dogs frothing at the mouth on a leash would burst into schools looking for Jewish children. Once Rio had been cleansed, the SS would advance farther north along the highway. Petrópolis would be their first port of call. They would seal off Avenida Koeler and begin their manhunt. They would easily track him down to 34 Rua Gonçalves Dias. They would break down the door. They would point their guns at them and force them to leave the house. They would make them climb into a curtain-sided lorry. They would then drive them down into the valley, just like they’d done with those women and children in the forests of Poland. In the little jungle close to Teresópolis, they would put a bullet in his head. After that it would be Lotte’s turn.

  Brazil, land of the future?

  *

  The housekeeper announced a visitor. A man in a dark suit with a thin, misshapen chestnut beard and a black hat on his head came into the lounge.

  “Rabbi Hemle, Henrique Hemle.”

  His handshake was firm, his gaze was thoughtful, intense and affable. The man must have been in his forties, but his features were lit by a boyish spark. His voice was gentle. In a fluent, elegant German he explained that he had made the trip from Rio specifically to meet his host and apologized for the intrusion, hoping that he hadn’t arrived at an inappropriate time.

  Stefan shook his head and replied that he wasn’t worth such a journey.

  “The journey had been long overdue,” the rabbi said. “I had already travelled once to hear you speak and catch a glimpse of you. That was back in 1923, in the wake of my bar mitzvah. My father, who was one of your devoted readers, had taken me to the theatre to see a performance of your play Jeremiah. You know, I’ve always asked myself whether I was inspired to become a rabbi by hearing Jeremiah’s voice. You had put these words into your hero’s mouth—and forgive me if I’m misquoting you here: ‘He may not sleep who watches over the people. The Lord hath appointed me to watch and to give warning.’ Isn’t that the sort of leap of faith a rabbi makes?”