Ostend
Page 9
Benjamin Marnefesh will be an old man when his fate and that of the menorah achieve their conclusion. It is roughly at the end of the first third of the book that the Jews of Rome gather at their cemetery on the ninth day of Av, the day of the destruction of the temple, to read from the Kinim, the songs of Lamentation, to pray together, to mourn and remember the day when the world’s Jews lost their homeland. At the end of this day the Jews will learn that the candelabrum has been stolen again and has been dispatched to Byzantium. Only one person will smile gently at this news: Benjamin, the most cultivated man in the congregation, senses that this bad news may conceal the kernel of its very opposite.
This passage defeats Stefan Zweig, perhaps because he lacks perspective, or his own personal memories, or experience, or participation, or historical material.
—
Zweig goes with Roth to Almondo, the Italian restaurant in Langestraat where he manages repeatedly to persuade him to eat. The host, Joseph Almondo, is proud of his two guests, and always serves them himself. And after they’ve eaten, they all drink a schnapps, a Verveine, together, to aid the digestion, as Almondo always remarks, to the joy of Joseph Roth.
In the afternoons Zweig can occasionally persuade Roth to sit for a while out on the terrace of the bistro with him and Lotte, in the fresh air, the wind, and the sun. Lotte has her camera with her; she laughs and asks the two friends to move together for a moment just this once, for a photo. Basically it’s enough for Roth to have put up with the sun shining on his head, but he doesn’t really want to put up a fight on such a beautiful day. So he peers into Lotte’s lens looking rather skeptical, not to say almost truculent, and lifts his right eyebrow a little in mockery. He’s not vain, he doesn’t care that the hair on his forehead is thin and a little disheveled or that his colorfully striped bowtie is a little crumpled. His new black jacket sits perfectly. But what to do with his hands? Uncertainly he holds on to the table, lays his hand with its nicotine-yellow fingers still clutching the tail end of a cigarette next to a half-full glass of wine, while Zweig slides over closer to his friend. His chair is somewhat higher, which makes him half a head taller than Roth; he smiles at him self-confidently. Zweig, whose tweed suit, waistcoat, and tie are making him too hot on this summer day, pays no attention to the camera but looks at Roth. Lotte sees Zweig’s look through the lens; yes, he’s looking down at his friend, but it is a fatherly look, or a big brother’s, gentle, loving, a little concerned. He sits there with a benevolent smile, and in Lotte’s camera it looks as if he’d have liked to put his arm around his friend’s shoulders, while Roth looks as if such a protective gesture is exactly what he fears.
Lotte takes her photo. Roth relaxes again, they talk about the day’s work more intensively and concisely than they have for a long time, in the way that they can do with nobody else. And Zweig tells Roth his problem with the Jewish legend and the passage that he just can’t get right. Such a thing is only possible with a relative, a brother, someone whose every line you know, someone whose old books you know, just as you know his new plans. “Terrible fate of a people, who must always wait for ‘tomorrow’ and ‘perhaps,’ always trust mutely in the written word and never receive a sign!” Zweig writes. And what was it like on the day of deepest mourning in the month of Av? What was that like, Roth?
In the evenings, everyone goes their own way again, Roth to the Hôtel de la Couronne to Irmgard Keun—Zweig has given him money so that he can pay for his room weeks in advance—and Zweig back to his small apartment in the Maison Floréal by the sea, on the broad Albert I promenade, a beautiful dark corner house with a little tower. He lives on the fourth floor, Lotte on the fifth, and there’s no elevator. Yes, it was barbaric for her, he had written to her beforehand, but that was the only way it would function. He needs his loggia—a workroom with a view of the sea and infinity. As Benjamin had seen it as a boy, watching the candelabrum disappear and wanting to save it: “He stared as if spellbound at the sea, which he espied for the first time. There it was, an endless mirror of blue, radiantly vaulted as far as the sharp divide where the waters met the sky and this enormous space seemed to him to be the dome of night, for it was the first time he had seen the full arch of the stars in the hollow of the heavens.”
So Zweig can look out at the North Sea every day and every evening. The lights of the casino shine all the way up into his room, making the sea in front of him all the darker.
—
Early next morning, a letter from Roth arrives, a little scrap of paper, only a few lines on it. A love letter, written in the course of the previous night. “Dear good friend,” it says, “in the manner of teenage girls and schoolboys, I have to tell you how sweet you were to me today, with the hotel and everything, and so I’m telling you, the way I would have said it at the age of eighteen when I tried in vain to find you in your apartment in Vienna. I’m thanking you for a piece of my youth and the capacity for sweet senseless talk. This time I’m giving you something written. Your J.R.”
His visit to Zweig’s house, where he had stood outside as a worshipful student—perhaps last night was the first time Roth had ever told his friend that story. How he stood there to no avail in a waistcoat, tie, and high white collar. It was only thirteen years later that Stefan Zweig became aware of his young colleague when Alfred Beierle, the skilled public speaker, gave him Roth’s book The Wandering Jews, the history of the Jews of eastern Europe who come to the West and are regarded there as a “problem,” as “guests from the East,” somewhat embarrassing relatives of the assimilated western Jews, poor and most of them recognizable at first glance as Jews.
It was the history of the world Joseph Roth himself came from, of the situation of the Jews of the Soviet Union, of the emigration to America: “Many emigrate out of some kind of urge, without really knowing why. They follow a vague call of the wild, or the specific call of a relative who’s already there. They have a yearning to see the world and to escape the supposed confines of their homeland, the will to be effective and have their strengths amount to something.
“Many return. More stop somewhere along the way. The Eastern Jews have no home, but they have graves in every cemetery. Many become rich. Many become important. Many become creative in a foreign culture. Many lose themselves and their purchase on the world. Many remain in the ghetto, and it is only their children who will eventually leave it again. The majority give to the West at least as much as they take from it. But all of them have the right to live in the West, at least all of them who sacrifice themselves to get there.”
Zweig, the western Jew, was so moved by this book that he wrote a letter to Joseph Roth to thank him for it and for his writing.
It was the beginning of their friendship, because Joseph Roth did not just thank his long-admired hero for the letter, he was ready with an immediate contradiction: “I don’t agree with you when you say that the Jews don’t believe in a hereafter. But that is a debate that would require a great deal of time and space.”
—
The envelope that reaches Stefan Zweig this morning contains not only the little piece of notepaper but a sheet filled with writing but with no header. It’s the “written” thing that Roth mentioned in his letter thanking Zweig for his friendship. It begins: “On the day of the ninth of Av the Jews gathered in the cemetery, as religious tradition demanded. Some read from the ‘Kinim,’ the songs of Lamentation. Every word therein was salty and bitter, like a tear.” Roth writes about the graves, the inscriptions on the graves, and about one gravestone into which the menorah had been carved: “which signifies that under this stone were rotting the bones of a Jew who once had gone through life with a wise heart, careful hands, a lucid mind, a sure tread, clear-eyed, had felt the world, thought it, understood it, seen it, and walked all through it. He had been a true light in Israel, which is why the candelabrum lighted his grave.” It is also a text about the touch of pain felt by the congregation as they watch the ninth day of Av slowly draw to its end. And he c
oncludes: “People were already closing the books, already beginning to think about their departure. Suddenly they heard the soft, melancholy creak of the old cemetery gate. Who might have left or come? The gate had been closed!”
Stefan Zweig reads and reads and is filled with deep gratitude. It is the text he has failed to write, the hinge, the day of deepest mourning in the Jewish cemetery in Rome between the overturned gravestones, before the gate opens and the messenger brings news that the menorah has been stolen again. Roth has written it for him, and Stefan Zweig inserts it into his legend, alters the tone and the melody a little, changes it into his text about the Jewish congregation of Rome, “as they gathered in the cemetery according to their custom, on the most grievous day of their year, the ninth day of Av, the day of the destruction of the temple, that day of grim memory that rendered their fathers homeless and scattered like salt across all the lands of the earth.” He writes about gravestones that announce “that he who lies here in eternal slumber, was a wise man and himself a light in Israel.” And finally, about the end of the day: “They did not notice that the ninth of Av, the day of deep mourning, was slowly drawing to a close and the hour was approaching of the last prayer. Then, outside, the rusty gate of the cemetery creaked.”
It will become in some small way their shared book, the story of eternal flight and of the belief that there is a place, which will hold its secret forever, where the Jews of the world will be able to live in peace. Benjamin has a replica of the menorah made; it is stolen again, disappears somewhere, but he has other plans for the genuine one: “God must decide, he and only he, the fate of the candelabrum. I will bury it, I know of no other way to truly protect it, but for how long, who can tell! Perhaps God will leave it forever in darkness, and our people will have to wander comfortless, dusty, and scattered over the back of the earth. Yet perhaps—and my heart is filled with this faith—perhaps his will may decree that our people go home to their land.” And then Zweig adds—and perhaps this is a real return to his friend Roth and his belief in the hereafter: “Do not concern yourself with the decision, leave it to him and to time! Let the candelabrum be presumed lost. We, we who are God’s secret—we are not lost! For gold does not disappear into the lap of the earth like the earthly body and our people do not disappear into the darkness of time. One will endure and the other will endure, our people and the candelabrum! So let us believe that that which we bury will rise again and light the people, the homecomers. For only if we do not cease to believe will we withstand the world.”
It’s an entreaty that Zweig is writing here with Roth’s assistance. An entreaty born of faith and a hope for an end to flight, including their flight—Zweig’s, Roth’s. That of their entire circle here at the shore. What will happen after the summer? It is slowly reaching its end.
As Roth had written in his text for Zweig: “It was already very late in the summer, it was already a very old, very tired summer, shortly before the fall. Summer itself resembled an old Jew, summer itself seemed to want to rest in the graveyard. It was mild, good-natured, and of golden wisdom.”
A few days later they are all sitting together again. All burned brown, except for Roth, the old enemy of sunshine. They are sitting in the Flore once more, with its view of the sea and the little bathing huts. Christiane Toller knits away defiantly, Gisela Kisch laughs whenever there’s something to laugh about and even when there isn’t. Lotte Altmann is quiet, and it’s only when she coughs softly that the rest of the circle even notices she’s still there. Emile Fuchs looks at the sea. Stefan Zweig sits between Lotte and Fuchs, smoking and listening as Egon Kisch talks about Spain, the war of the Communists, the latest reports from the front, and Arthur Koestler about his travel plans, which should bring him into Franco’s headquarters. Ernst Toller blazes away at him, admittedly only half-seriously, but all the more loudly, merrily, and determinedly. Kesten laughs along with Gisela Kisch at the heatedness of the men, Christiane’s knitting, and Stefan Zweig’s silence. Irmgard Keun has fetched Joseph Roth out of the dark corner of the bistro into the light, drinks with him, and whenever he casts a brief, sarcastic remark into the circle, she seems for a moment to hesitate. She would so love to be on the side of the Communist believers, and also on the side of the harmless, somehow uninvolved laughing audience. But she’s with him, and his lack of belief is hers too, even if she knows that his religion, his monarchism, is just another form of escape, a trapdoor that is not open to her. There are laughter, argument, and things unspoken this evening at the Café Flore, but everything is more muted than at the beginning of the summer. Hope has melted a little further. Despite Spain. Because of Spain. Despite the German-Austrian agreement or because of it. And despite the peace in Germany and in Berlin in advance of the Olympics. Another summer is passing without the arrival of the decisive turning point, without real signs that the Fascist domination in Europe is approaching its end. At least not this summer, not this year, and for many people no longer within the time frame they will live to see.
“I’M AS BLACK AS A NEGRO,” Erwin Kisch writes to his mother in Prague shortly before he leaves, then he travels back to Versailles with Gisela; next summer he will set off for Spain to join the war. Arthur Koestler meanwhile has already gone in the same direction. Ernst Toller, to Christiane’s horror, has accepted an invitation to do a lecture tour across America. She had accepted a one-year theater engagement in London, an extraordinary chance for a young German actress in exile. “Please no!” she begs him. “You have to stay home!” “Home? Where’s that?” asks Toller in reply. And in October she stands on the deck of the SS Normandie, salt water in her face, hoping that the wind will blow her back to England and London instead of New York, according to plan. But it doesn’t blow hard enough.
Hermann Kesten is struggling with his Philip II and is failing to make progress. The advance from the publishing house is used up; he wants to stay in Amsterdam near the publishing house and write and live halfway cheaply. Then a new edict is issued that refugee identity cards will become mandatory in Holland. So in October he goes to Paris again, to apply for this identity card, but he no longer has enough money for the return journey. From the train he writes to a friend: “At every station boys get on, heading for the garrison, at every station the same family stands, weeping mother, melancholy father, giggling sister; they wave as if the son were already going off to a kind of prelude to war.”
—
Stefan Zweig and Lotte Altmann also leave the summer resort. Zweig is happier than he’s been for years. Filled with inspiration, he writes to Friderike—with whom he’s done nothing in the last months but fight, in person and by letter—about his happiness here in Belgium; his work, which has advanced so well, better than it has in a long time; the peace, the absence of arguments and bad reviews. “And I’ve managed to lift Roth as well, he eats something every day now—though nobody can compel him to take a walk, let alone go for a swim. I also took care of him for a time, though I feel things look black for him—as they do for all writers —; sales are plummeting and the difficulties are only going to increase.” And he’s just had a wonderful swim and hopes to have another, his last tomorrow morning early.
Before he leaves, however, he walks down a cul-de-sac that leads away from the sea, rising toward the town. The narrow house is still there. The window display is the same as it was, shells suspended on threads, grinning masks, starfish, ashtrays. But it’s obviously no longer a shop. James Ensor is a famous man, the king of Ostend; he’s been made a baron, and since the death of his mother, the entire house has become his atelier. Stefan Zweig hesitates over whether to go in and upstairs to the skull wearing the lady’s hat, the man at the piano, and the thousand spite-filled masks behind. He doesn’t. He turns back toward the sea. One last swim.
—
Saying goodbye to Roth is both hard, for Zweig, and easy. It’s freeing. His burden, the most beloved weight on his shoulders, his bad conscience, his literary conscience, his incorruptible, difficu
lt friend is staying behind, while he himself is starting out for a new world. Yes, he lifted him up, has left money for him, and brought order to his contracts, even some order into his life. And now there’s Keun here too, who makes Roth happy, who looks after him, is by his side and will stay there, untroubled by all the destructiveness and the self-destructiveness, maybe even spurring it on with her furious urge to live, to write, to drink. With her love of him, of his hatreds, his sadness, his readiness to go down in flames if the world cannot be saved. Zweig is leaving Roth with his lover.
The evening before his departure, they are at their Italian restaurant yet again, one street below the promenade; one last good burst of encouragement from Zweig, one last discussion of plans, literary plans. One last Verveine. Zweig wants to believe he’s leaving his friend with future prospects that are halfway stable, so he can leave without feeling pity. But deep inside he knows quite clearly that the stabilization that has taken place this summer is no more than a little false security. He has written to Huebsch that Roth’s novels are getting worse, and things look black for him and his books, both in the European market and in America. Zweig knows this and doesn’t want to know it. He can’t do any more for Roth without being dragged under himself. Not now. He wants to be free. The summer has given him new strength in a way few summers have done. He’s determined to make use of this new surge of energy for a kind of breakthrough. He believes in it again and is set on retaining that belief.