by Stefan Zweig
The motionless fugitive stared after him, and as the only person who understood his language dwindled in the distance, his face, which had brightened, grew gloomy again. His avid glances followed the figure of the manager as he went away, going up to the hotel above the bank of the lake, and he took no notice of the others present who were smiling at his strange demeanour. When a sympathetic bystander touched him and pointed to the inn, his heavy shoulders seemed to slump, and he went to the doorway with his head bowed. The bar was opened for him. He sat down at the table, where the barmaid brought him a glass of brandy by way of welcome, and stayed there without moving all afternoon, his eyes clouded. The village children kept looking in at the windows, laughing and shouting something at him—he never raised his head. Customers coming in looked at him curiously, but he sat where he was, back bowed, eyes staring at the table, shy and bashful. And when a crowd of guests came in to eat at midday and filled the room with their laughter, while hundreds of words he did not understand swirled around him and he himself, horribly aware of being a foreigner here, sat deaf and mute amidst the general liveliness, his hands trembled so badly that he could hardly raise the spoon from his soup. Suddenly a large tear ran down his cheek and dropped heavily on the table. He looked timidly around him. The others present had noticed the tear, and suddenly fell silent. And he felt ashamed; his large, shaggy head sank closer and closer to the black wood of the table.
He sat like that until evening. People came and went; he did not notice them, and they had stopped noticing him. He sat in the shadow of the stove like a shadow himself, his hands resting heavily on the table. He was forgotten, and no one saw him suddenly rise when twilight came and go up the path to the hotel, plodding lethargically like an animal. He stood for an hour at the door there, cap humbly in his hand, and then for another hour, not looking at anyone. At last this strange figure, standing still and black as a tree stump outside the sparkling lights of the hotel entrance as if he had put down roots there, attracted the attention of one of the pageboys, who fetched the manager. Once again his dark face lightened a little when he heard his own language.
“What do you want, Boris?” asked the manager kindly.
“Forgive me,” stammered the fugitive, “I only wanted … I wanted to know if I can go home.”
“Of course, Boris, to be sure you can go home,” smiled the manager.
“Tomorrow?”
Now the other man looked grave too. The words had been spoken in so pleading a tone that the smile vanished from his face.
“No, Boris … not just yet. Not until the war is over.”
“When is that? When will the war be over?”
“God only knows. We humans don’t.”
“But before that? Can’t I go before that?”
“No, Boris.”
“Is it so far to go?”
“Yes.”
“Many more days’ journey?”
“Many more days.”
“I’ll go all the same, sir. I’m strong. I don’t tire easily.”
“But you can’t, Boris. There’s a border between here and your home.”
“A border?” He looked blank. The word was new to him. Then he said again, with his extraordinary obstinacy, “I’ll swim over it.”
The manager almost smiled. But he was painfully moved, and explained gently, “No, Boris, that’s impossible. A border means there’s a foreign country on the other side. People won’t let you through.”
“But I won’t hurt them! I threw my rifle away. Why wouldn’t they let me go back to my wife, if I ask them in Christ’s name?”
The manager was feeling increasingly heavy at heart. Bitterness rose in him. “No,” he said, “they won’t let you through, Boris. People don’t take any notice of the word of Christ any more.”
“But what am I to do, sir? I can’t stay here! The people that live here don’t understand me, and I don’t understand them.”
“You’ll soon learn, Boris.”
“No, sir.” The Russian bowed his head. “I can’t learn things. I can only work in the fields, that’s all I know how to do. What would I do here? I want to go home! Show me the way!”
“There isn’t any way at the moment, Boris.”
“But sir, they can’t forbid me to go home to my wife and my children! I’m not a soldier any more.”
“Oh yes, they can, Boris.”
“What about the Tsar?” He asked the question very suddenly, trembling with expectation and awe.
“There’s no Tsar any more, Boris. He’s been deposed.”
“No Tsar any more?” He stared dully at the other man, the last glimmer of light went out in his eyes, and then he said very wearily, “So I can’t go home?”
“Not yet. You’ll have to wait, Boris.”
The face in the dark grew ever gloomier. “I’ve waited so long already! I can’t wait any more. Show me the way to go! I want to try!”
“There’s no way, Boris. They’d arrest you at the border. Stay here and we’ll find you work.”
“People here don’t understand me, and I don’t understand them,” he obstinately repeated. “I can’t live here! Help me, sir!”
“I can’t, Boris.”
“Help me, sir, for the sake of Christ! Help me, I can’t bear it any more!”
“I can’t, Boris. There’s no way anyone can help anyone else these days.”
They faced each other in silence. Boris was twisting his cap in his hands. “Then why did they take me away from home? They said I had to fight for Russia and the Tsar. But Russia is far away from here, and the Tsar … what do you say they did to the Tsar?”
“They deposed him.”
“Deposed.” He repeated the word without understanding it. “What am I to do, sir? I have to go home! My children are crying for me. I can’t live here. Help me, sir, help me!”
“I just can’t, Boris.”
“Can no one help me?”
“Not at the moment.”
The Russian bent his head even further, and then said abruptly, in hollow tones, “Thank you, sir,” and turned away.
He went down the path very slowly. The hotel manager watched him for a long time, and was surprised when he did not go to the inn, but on down the steps to the lake. He sighed deeply and went back to his work in the hotel.
As chance would have it, it was the same fisherman who found the drowned man’s naked body next morning. He had carefully placed the trousers, cap and jacket that he had been given on the bank, and went into the water just as he had come out of it. A statement was taken about the incident, and since no one knew the stranger’s full name, a cheap wooden cross was put on the place where he was buried, one of those little crosses planted over the graves of unknown soldiers that now cover the continent of Europe from end to end.
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
IN THEIR VARIOUS WAYS the four stories by Stefan Zweig in this volume, two long and two quite short, could all be regarded as studies in suicide. The events leading to the deaths of the four central characters however, are very different. The narrator of Amok, a doctor in the grip of sexual obsession and guilt, ultimately drowns himself in the Bay of Naples in order to protect the guilty secret of an extra-marital pregnancy followed by a botched back-street abortion. His tragic tale, told to a chance-met shipboard companion, employs Zweig’s favourite device of a central story within a framework narrative, imparting a touch of the Ancient Mariner to the doctor’s compulsive monologue, which with its early twentieth-century colonial setting has also dark Conradian complexities.
The suicide of the central character of Leporella, the slow-witted maidservant Crescenz whose absolute devotion to her employer leads her to murder his unloved wife, is the climax of a chilling murder story. Once her services are rejected by the Baron for whom she did anything and everything she could—and who is horrified to discover just what she has done—life leads nowhere but to the water of the Danube Canal in Vienna. And the two shorter stories also en
d in suicide: François, the waiter from the Grand Hotel in The Star above the Forest who has fallen hopelessly in love with an aristocratic hotel guest, cannot bear to lose even the sight of her for ever, and finds a final union only by letting the wheels of the train carrying her away crush him as he lies on the tracks. In Incident on Lake Geneva, a First World War Russian prisoner-of-war, who has made his way to the banks of the Swiss lake believing that his native land lies only on the other side of the water is cast into such despair on learning how unattainable return from exile still is that he drowns himself, giving up all hope of ever being reunited with his wife and children.
One might reasonably suppose, then, that Stefan Zweig, like Webster in T S Eliot’s famous line, was much possessed by death. Yet although the elegiac note prevails, in all these four suicides there are gleams of light, certain redeeming features. For example, even in the character of the maidservant Crescenz, nicknamed by her employer’s mistress Leporella after the manservant Leporello in Don Giovanni. There is pathos in her story, and her premeditated murder of the Baroness is committed as much from a twisted idea of duty and devotion as out of sheer malice, although malice also enters the equation. The doctor narrator of Amok finds a kind of absolution in going to his death with the body of the woman he had loved, in order to fulfil her dying wish and save her reputation. The protagonists of the shorter stories both die literally for love, in despair at being parted from the objects of their desire. Their suicides are almost wished for; the waiter François suffers an almost lyrical death, a Liebestod accepted with peaceful resignation, which somehow momentarily and almost mystically stirs the heart of the woman who knew him only as a member of the hotel staff. And ironically, the first line of Incident on Lake Geneva, giving the date of the story as 1918, makes it clear that perhaps it would not have been so long before the Russian prisoner-of-war was able to make his way home after all.
Ironically too, when Stefan Zweig and his second wife themselves committed suicide in 1942, it seems to have been in despair at the turn that the Second World War appeared to be taking. Zweig had already been appalled by the horrors of the 1914-1918 war; between the wars, as an Austrian Jew, he had been obliged to go into exile abroad when Nazi anti-Semitism threatened anyone of Jewish descent, whether they were a practising Jew or not. In forcing so many fine writers, artists and musicians to leave, Germany and Austria, nations that took such well-justified pride in their artistic culture, wilfully deprived themselves of many who had made a huge contribution to it, and would continue to create fine works in exile. Zweig went first to live in England, then to the United States, and finally moved to Brazil. In February 1942 the fall of Singapore, one of the worst British defeats suffered in the war, made it seem to him that the Nazis and their Japanese allies were on the point of conquering the world, and a few days later he and his wife killed themselves.
In yet another twist of irony, one that has been noted by many readers and literary critics, the last novella that Zweig wrote, Schachnovelle (The Royal Game), has as its protagonist a man who successfully withstands psychological torture by the Nazis through sheer force of mind. He emerges frail and damaged from his ordeal, but he survives. The fact that Zweig did not is yet another indictment of the Nazi regime that turned its back on all the civilising influences of the pan-European culture in which he was so much at home. He was not gassed in a death camp, but Hitler, with whose intentions he had become obsessed, can be said to have killed him just the same, when another twenty years of life and creative work might still have lain ahead of him.
Copyright
For Federico, in memory of Matteo
Original texts © Williams Verlag A G Zurich
Amok
First published in German as
Amok in 1922
The Star above the Forest
First published in German as
Der Stern über dem Walde in 1904
Leporella
First published in German as
Leporella in 1954
Incident on Lake Geneva
This revised text first published in German as
Episode am Genfer See in 1936
English translation © Anthea Bell
Print edition first published in 2006 by
Pushkin Press
12 Chester Terrace
London N1 4ND
Reprinted 2007 2010
This ebook edition first published 2011
ISBN 978 1 906548 54 4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
Cover: Sleeve of the Dervish 17th c Safavid tile
Courtesy of Simon Ray London
Frontispiece: Portrait of Stefan Zweig
© Roger-Viollet Rex Features
Set in 10 on 12 Baskerville Monotype
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