The Last Days

by Laurent Seksik

  Other words spoken by the choirs in Jeremiah came flooding through Stefan’s mind, words that he’d put in his characters’ mouths more than thirty years earlier.

  Wanderers, sufferers, our drink must be drawn from distant waters, evil their taste, bitter in the mouth, the nations will drive us from home after home, we will wander down suffering’s endless roads, eternally vanquished, thralls at the hearths where in passing we rest.

  How had he been able to write that in 1916?

  Henrique Hemle, the chief rabbi of Rio, said he was originally from Hamburg. He had fled the Reich in 1935 along with his wife and two children. Hamburg, he contemplated, had no doubt been cleansed of all its Jews, maybe Hemle’s family was dying of cold and hunger in the east, just like all of Berlin’s and Vienna’s Jews. Or maybe—as the BBC had reported on 30th November—Hemle’s family had been among those five thousand German Jews executed at Kaunas in Lithuania as soon as they’d left the trains. Maybe Hemle’s family had been lucky and been cooped up in the large ghetto in Minsk, previously occupied by Belarusian Jews, all of whom had been executed, down to the last one, in order to make room for those lucky German Jews. Stefan didn’t ask after Hemle’s family. It was the golden rule that everyone had abided by ever since the news had spread that Germany and Austria were in the process of becoming judenrein. Nobody asked questions any more. Everyone preferred to remain in the dark. They sought relief in ignorance and uncertainty. They knew. The families that had been driven out of the Reich had been expelled from the land of the living. They walked through the timeless woods, wandering, side by side, surrounded by anguished cries, hordes of fraternal spectres, all of whom were pale, naked and tormented, as they marched firm-footed and with dignity towards the darkness, doleful shadows walking in the freezing air, trembling in the fog, women leading the way as they held back their tears, watching their children vanish into the realm of endless pain, letting the fingers of their little loved ones slip out of their grasp, saying their goodbyes without opening their mouths, spilling torrents of silent, invisible tears, the endless grief of mothers looking on as reality unfolds to reveal an infinite grey expanse, an ocean of heaped-up bodies, the place of lovers’ rendezvous and family reunions. The next world.

  “I was very moved by your reply to my invitation,” the rabbi continued, “to celebrate the day of Yom Kippur with us at the Great Synagogue in Rio. You apologized by saying that ‘to your great shame’, you did not have a religious upbringing. You shouldn’t feel ashamed, Mr Zweig. That was the way things were done at the time. We were Germans first and foremost, Austrians first and foremost. In those times, we simply followed in our fathers’ footsteps. Our fathers were great builders and soldiers for both the Second Reich and Hindenburg. It was our misfortune to place all our hopes in progress and emancipation rather than in God and our ancestors. You know, my father, who was an eminent professor at the University of Hamburg, one day confided in me that, like many others Jews at that time, he had been tempted to convert to Christianity. I inherited my faith from my grandfather, who taught me to read the Torah and to believe in God, go figure why religion seems to skip a generation… I’m not here to lecture but… you see yourself as far removed from your Jewish identity, and I’m aware of your fierce opposition to Zionism as you abhor all forms of nationalism. But let me tell you something, down in the depths of your soul there is something in you that is rooted to our Jewish traditions. Your Jeremiah is steeped in Jewish culture. What about Mendel the bookseller? Look at your friend and mentor Freud. Freud didn’t hesitate in stripping us of our only heroes, and turned Moses into an Egyptian with his essay on monotheism, breaking our only idol at the same time that our synagogues were being burnt down. Even in your darkest hours you didn’t commit such a sacrilege. You instead gave us an inkling of hope, brought our old epics to life with The Buried Candelabrum. I’m not that naive you know. I know that there isn’t a single rabbi left alive in Germany, or for that matter in Poland and Ukraine. The Jewish world is being annihilated. In a year or maybe five, you and I, my dear Mr Zweig, may very well be among the last survivors of the tribe of Israel. That’s why we need to fight—even if we’re tempted to rejoin our loved ones, even if we feel ashamed that we’re free to breathe while they are left gasping for air. The great Reich won’t have a moment of peace so long as there is still a single rabbi left alive to read the Torah and wear his tefillin and tallith—even if that rabbi is ten thousand miles away from Berlin. They will want to come looking for him and will dispatch an entire army to do so. They claim that the Reich is slowing its advance through Russia in order to kill Jewish children—may God watch over those innocent souls. So imagine Goebbels finding out that Zweig is still alive and wielding the German tongue better than anyone… If you’ll forgive this piece of advice, don’t keep yourself inside this prison. According to our tradition, man defines himself first and foremost according to his relationships with others. We measure one life in the light of another. I’m not asking you to open yourself up to God, it is undoubtedly a bad moment to choose to put your faith in His hands given that He seems to have been increasingly turning His back on His people. Only allow me to speak to you as a rabbi, renew your relationships with people—there we have it, this is the reason behind my visit, please come and take part in the Passover Seder. The Pesach this year will have greater resonance than any Pesach before. This old story we’re going to read on the night of the Seder, that story about the Pharaoh ordering the execution of all our firstborn sons, is the same tragedy our European martyrs are living today. Come and share our meal of bitter herbs and matzo bread and hear the Haggadah. Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Eliezer will tell us the story of our wandering, bondage, misery and death. They will teach us that the darkest hour is just before the dawn. You and your wife need to hear those words. Come and pray, even if you aren’t a believer. The sadness that afflicts us is too much for one man to bear, even if that man is the great Stefan Zweig… Well, there we have it, I won’t inconvenience you any longer, but… promise me you’ll try to make it.”

  He replied that he would do his best. He accompanied rabbi Hemle to the front steps. When it was time to close the door on him, he recalled some more words from his Jeremiah:

  I have cursed my God and extinguished Him from my soul.

  *

  Above Petrópolis, the sky was no longer a bright azure. It was the middle of the tropical summer and a swarm of black clouds had unleashed a heavy rainfall. It felt as if they were breathing water. It no longer resembled anything like Baden and Sommerdigen. The air didn’t smell sweet any more, the days were clammy and stultifying, while the nights were like being inside a furnace. Lotte spent most of her time gasping for air, going from the bed to the veranda, then opening and shutting the window, oppressed by the lack of air. She refrained from leaving the house lest she get caught in the rain, and whenever she surmounted her fears, she found herself smarting under the brunt of the storms. She would linger in the middle of the deserted street, as if paralysed, churning over the thought that just like trees attract lightning, she was a magnet for unhappiness. She felt cursed, punished for her errors, she had sinned in London, she had got involved with a married man and stolen him away from his wife and the Lord was now unleashing His wrath on her. She had sinned, she had fled from the war, tempted to cheat her destiny, abandoned her nearest and dearest to their unhappiness. She hadn’t shared the bread of suffering with them. O the almighty Lord who turned ungodly women into statues of salt. Petrified, she lingered under the storm. She had entered into a covenant with this man, and this same man was afraid of everything except God’s wrath. She had turned her back on her people while her loved ones tried to keep one another warm with their bodies in the freezing Polish cold—and there she was, with no one to hold her hand, having accompanied a man who sought escape and exile, seeking the peaceful bliss of enchanting dawns. The Lord is the only refuge, the Lord who blessed our forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Lord who shielded us
from tyrants and the revenge of oppressors, the Lord who helped those who believed in Him. Her sin was too great and the transgression unforgivable. Anguished and exhausted, she went back into the house. She swore she would never again brave the elements. Over the course of the following days, she meandered around the house, haggard and with lacklustre eyes, running short of breath at the slightest effort, uncommunicative, not daring to add to her unhappiness, letting her body speak for her instead, expressing herself with coughing fits. The physician was summoned at all hours of day and night. The pills had stopped working. He injected her with a drug he’d concocted himself and which he said would heal her. He looked for a vein and pricked her flesh in vain again and again, tightening the tourniquet. Her veins continually slipped from under his fingers, running away from the needle, and, having reached the end of his tether, the doctor, contrary to all logic, injected the solution into her anyway. Instead of coursing through her veins, the drug collected into a burning cyst on her arm. The doctor left on a reassuring note, the drug was now in her body, wasn’t that what mattered in the end?

  On occasion, she felt like her lungs were wholly devoid of air. She would worry that she would die of asphyxiation and feel herself being dragged into an abyss. Sometimes she could distinguish words of reassurance through her confusion. Her brain and blood were starved of oxygen and her body oppressed by pain. Her mind had lost all grip on reality.

  Sometimes, while she lay at the bottom of the dark lake of suffering, she felt on the verge of deliverance. Liberated from the burden of her body, she would experience a sort of euphoria. Alas, every time she woke up, she was back in her body. She would get back on her feet, recover the use of her limbs and be able to see colours once more. She would reacquire sensation in her fingertips—and the man by her bedside would smile at her.

  *

  That morning, they had received another threatening letter, the third in ten days. “We’ve found you. We’re going to kill you and that Jewish bitch of yours.” Those words plunged him into fear. He knew that Rio was a veritable nest of German spies. The hotels were teeming with Gestapo agents. A few days earlier, the newspapers had run a story about the murder of an exile. Arthur Wolfe, a member of the old German Communist Party, had been found on the quay with a bullet in his head. Photographs of the body had made the front page.

  The names of high-profile exiles had been disclosed. The morning papers had confirmed that he was on that list. Would he be next? They had managed to find him on the other side of the world. It seemed Petrópolis wasn’t far enough removed from Berlin. Where could he possibly go? Should he disappear into the jungle and go to live with Amazonian tribes? Would Hitler determine his fate until the end of time?

  Someone in town must have spotted him and divulged his address. He distrusted everyone. Everywhere he looked he saw informers skulking around each street corner. The baker’s “Good morning” had a certain pointedness to it, the greengrocer had sold him rotten guavas, a new employee at the post office had insisted on being given his full address, the housekeeper’s brother had been spotted near the house on the pretext of having come to see his sister, the woman who worked at the library had asked him why his books were no longer being published in German, while the waitress who worked at the Café Élégant never looked him in the eye. Was he being watched? One day he’d had the feeling he was being observed. On another occasion, he’d heard the sound of footsteps behind him throughout his walk. He had stopped walking and the sound of footsteps had also stopped. He hadn’t turned around. What would he have seen if he had? A local or a blond giant in a trench coat and leather hat? He pictured himself making the headlines:

  “Author of Brazil, Land of the Future killed.”

  He imagined the photo that would accompany the article. The sight of his corpse haunted him.

  So long as he was in the house, he feared nothing. He always carried a vial of barbitone on his person. They would never catch him alive. They would never mutilate his body. He refused to bestow a picture of his bloodied face to posterity. The barbitone would work fast, before the assassins would have the chance to aim their guns, before they’d hear the door creak. Barbitone was the ace up their sleeve. It was their last line of defence. Walter Benjamin had had his vial, as had Ernst Weiss and Erwin Rieger—and countless others, all his Viennese cousins and his friends in Berlin, people whose last wish had been not to fall into the hands of the Nazis, and who had sought a farcical victory over the forces of barbarism. All the exiles whispered in hushed tones about this friendly vial, their fellow sufferer, their exit visa. The last journey.

  *

  Stefan had long hesitated paying a visit to Bernanos, who was now living in Barbacena, a few hours’ train ride from Petrópolis. He had wanted to spare the Frenchman his inconsolable grief and heavy silences, in other words, his presence. Yet he wanted to see a writer, to reawaken the feeling of sharing life with a kindred soul—to meet with another author who had opted for life in exile. He longed to be able to speak French once again, to discover a corner of Paris deep in the heart of the Brazilian jungle. Who knew? Perhaps his host’s enthusiasm would prove infectious and he would finally find the strength to start writing again.

  Bernanos had taken a path parallel to his own, and like Stefan, he had left Europe, despairing of all those who’d given way to Hitlerism, and had been lured away by the allure of Latin America. The Frenchman had pushed even farther into the country, winding up in a desolate region of barren hills three hundred kilometres to the north of Rio, a place called Cruz das Almas. Aside from a shared passion for Brazil, Stefan and Bernanos were equally fascinated by the Fall, the longing for a paradise lost—for Stefan it was fin de siècle, cosmopolitan Vienna, while for Bernanos it was the old Christian France. They also bonded over their abhorrence of fascism and communism. As far as literature was concerned, the chronicler of human passions felt a kinship with the “prophet of the sacred”. Just like Bernanos, Stefan considered Balzac’s The Human Comedy as the most successful work of literature ever composed and saw Dostoevsky as an undisputed master. He had read Bernanos’s Under the Sun of Satan and Diary of a Country Priest. He had adored the fiery urgency of his scenes, his fragmentary aesthetic, how those books grew increasingly insular until they opened onto vast abysses. Bernanos’s characters were all a little unhinged, full of a sense of their own heroism. Then there was their cosmic dimension. Stefan admired the manner in which his host explored the notion of despair. Nevertheless, he feared meeting Bernanos as much as he desired it. It wasn’t the author’s anti-Semitic past that frightened him. Bernanos’s fight against Franco, his immediate denunciation of the Vichy regime—and Stefan’s reading of A Diary of My Times—had allowed him to forget all about Right-Thinking People’s Greatest Fear. He didn’t know whether or not people had the capacity to change, but he was willing to give this devout Catholic the benefit of the doubt. Redemption by way of exile. After all, Bernanos had a long track record of making a break with the past. He’d broken off all ties with Action Française, Maurras and the Vatican. He might very well have rid himself of his hatred of Jews. Bernanos’s fiercely anti-Semitic past was of little import. Something else held Stefan back, and made him postpone the date of his visit week after week. First of all, there was Bernanos’s unwavering love of the motherland, and his quasi-mystical belief in God. Stefan abhorred nationalism and did not believe in God—neither the Jewish God nor the Christian one. He no longer held out any hope for man and feared the excesses prompted by political convictions. Every time Stefan had taken part in anti-Nazi demonstrations, he had done so half-heartedly. Although it was a difficult stance to defend, he believed that Jews shouldn’t concern themselves with anti-Semitism, which only brought dishonour on people who subscribed to that idea. Stefan hadn’t done anything wrong and didn’t need to defend himself. He only cared about one thing: to safeguard his freedom. Alas, these days his inner world was a heap of ruins.

  Physically exhausted and on the verge of
a nervous breakdown, Stefan feared a confrontation with Bernanos, a highly opinionated man who was prone to flights of anger. Stefan dreaded being flattened under Bernanos’s rock of faith. He didn’t want to justify his pessimism, defeatism and weaknesses in front of the French national bard and Christ’s Messenger. Although he didn’t want to admit it to himself, he was also afraid that Bernanos might read his mind and glimpse into the recesses of his soul, just like his hero, the Abbé Donissan. That he would only have to look at him to discern the “black disease” that was gnawing at him, his cowardly actions, or, worse still, that he might even look upon him with pity.

  Nevertheless, one day he forgot about all his apprehensions. He wanted to talk literature with an actual writer—when journalists like Feder and editors like Koogan spoke about literature they only really talked about books. When Lotte suggested they go to Cruz das Almas, he consented, especially after she had assured him they would take come back the same evening.

  The farther they left Petrópolis behind, the more the landscape shed its colours, revealing a post-apocalyptic terrain with endless peaks and parched valleys. After an hour in that lethargic train compartment, Stefan already regretted his decision. Why did he feel like he was a student undergoing a process of self-examination in front of a professor of moral theology?

  The trip seemed to last for ever. Once they’d arrived, he got up, bone-tired, stepped out of the compartment and examined his reflection in a mirror. He was tempted to jump on the next train and go home. However, he was met by a man on the platform who claimed he had been sent by Bernanos and who led them to a car. After a half-hour drive through a desolate landscape, they entered a forest and found themselves on a deserted road. Bernanos was waiting for them at the end of it, holding the reins of a horse. The car came to a stop. Stefan got out. Bernanos embraced him as though they’d been old friends—they had never crossed paths hitherto—and kissed Lotte’s hand. They then crossed a field and stepped inside a rather austere stone house.