by Stefan Zweig
I trembled, scared to death. “What’s the matter?” was all I could stammer. He looked at me without speaking; words failed him too. At last he put the candle down on the chest of drawers, and immediately the bat-like fluttering of shadows around the room was calmed. Finally he stammered: “I wanted … I wanted … ”
Again his voice failed. He stood looking at the floor like a thief caught in the act. This anxiety was unbearable as we stood there, I in my nightshirt, trembling with cold, he with his back bowed, confused with shame.
Suddenly the frail figure moved. He came towards me—at first a smile, malevolent, faun-like, a dangerous, glinting smile that showed only in his eyes (for his lips were compressed) grinned rigidly at me for a moment like a strange mask—and then the voice spoke, sharp as a snake’s forked tongue: “I only wanted to say … we’d better not. You … It isn’t right, not a young student and his teacher, do you understand?” He had changed back to the formal Sie pronoun. “One must keep one’s distance … distance … distance … ”
And he looked at me with such hatred, such insulting and vehement ill-will that his hand involuntarily clenched. I stumbled back. Was he mad? Was he drunk? There he stood, fist clenched, as if he were about to fling himself on me or strike me in the face.
But the horror lasted only a second; and then that penetrating glance was lowered and turned in on itself. He turned, muttered something that sounded like an apology, and picked up the candle. His shadow, an obedient black devil which had fallen to the floor, rose again and swirled to the door ahead of him. And then he himself was gone, before I had summoned up the strength to think of anything to say. The latch of the door clicked shut; the stairs creaked heavily, painfully, under what seemed his hasty footsteps.
I shall not forget that night; cold rage alternated wildly with a baffled, incandescent despair. Thoughts flashed through my mind like flaring rockets. Why does he torment me, my anguished and tortured mind asked a hundred times, why does he hate me so much that he will creep upstairs at night on purpose to hurl such hostile insults in my face? What have I done to him, what was I supposed to do instead? How am I to make my peace without knowing what I’ve done to hurt him? I flung myself on the bed in a fever, got up, buried myself under the covers again, but that ghostly picture was always in my mind’s eye: my teacher slinking up here, confused by my presence, and behind him, mysterious and strange, that monstrous shadow tumbling over the wall.
When I woke in the morning, after a short period of brief and shallow slumber, I told myself at first that I must have been dreaming. But there were still round, yellow, congealed drops of candle wax on the chest of drawers. And in the middle of the bright, sunlit room my dreadful memory of last night’s furtive visitor returned again and again.
I stayed in my room all morning. The thought of meeting him sapped my strength. I tried to write, to read; nothing was any use. My nerves were undermined and might fall into shattering convulsions at any moment, I might begin sobbing and howling—for I could see my own fingers trembling like leaves on a strange tree, I was unable to still them, and my knees felt as weak as if the sinews had been cut. What was I to do? What was I to do? I asked myself that question over and over again until I was exhausted; the blood was already pounding in my temples, there were blue shadows under my eyes. But I could not go out, could not go downstairs, could not suddenly face him without being certain of myself, without having some strength in my nerves again. Once again I flung myself on the bed, hungry, confused, unwashed, distressed, and once again my senses tried to penetrate the thin floorboards: where was he now, what was he doing, was he awake like me, was he as desperate as I myself ?
Midday came, and I still lay on the fiery rack of my confusion, when I heard a step on the stairs at last. All my nerves jangled with alarm, but it was a light, carefree step running upstairs two at a time—and now a hand was knocking at the door. I jumped up without opening it. “Who’s there?” I asked. “Why don’t you come downstairs to eat?” replied his wife’s voice, in some annoyance. “Aren’t you well?” “No, no,” I stammered in confusion. “Just coming, just coming.” And now there was nothing I could do but get my clothes on and go downstairs. But my limbs were so unsteady that I had to cling to the banister.
I went into the dining-room. My teacher’s wife was waiting in front of one of the two places that had been laid, and greeted me with a mild reproach for having to be reminded. His own place was empty. I felt the blood rise to my face. What did his unexpected absence mean? Did he fear our meeting even more than I did? Was he ashamed, or didn’t he want to share a table with me any more? Finally I made up my mind to ask whether the Professor wasn’t coming in to lunch.
She looked up in surprise. “Don’t you know he went away this morning, then?” “Went away?” I stammered. “Where to?” Her face immediately tensed. “My husband did not see fit to tell me, but probably— well another of his usual excursions.” Then she turned towards me with a sudden sharp, questioning look. “You mean that you don’t know? He went up to see you on purpose last night—I thought it was to say goodbye … how strange, how very strange that he didn’t tell you either.”
“Me!” I could utter only a scream. And to my shame and disgrace, that scream swept away everything that had been so dangerously dammed up in me during the last few hours. Suddenly it all burst out in a sobbing, howling, raging convulsion—I vomited a gurgling torrent of words and screams tumbling over one another, a great swirling mass of confused desperation, I wept— no, I shook, my trembling mouth brought up all the torment that had accumulated inside me. Fists drumming frantically on the table like a child throwing a tantrum, face covered with tears, I let out what had been hanging over me for weeks like a thunderstorm. And while I found relief in that wild outbreak, I also felt boundless shame in giving so much of myself away to her.
“What on earth is the matter? For God’s sake!” She had risen to her feet, astonished. But then she hurried up to me and led me from the table to the sofa. “Lie here and calm down.” She stroked my hands, she passed her own hands over my hair, while the aftermath of my spasms still shook my trembling body. “Don’t distress yourself, Roland—please don’t distress yourself. I know all about it, I could feel it coming.” She was still stroking my hair, but suddenly her voice grew hard. “I know just how he can confuse one, nobody knows better. But please believe me, I always wanted to warn you when I saw you leaning on him so much, on a man who can’t even support himself. You don’t know him, you’re blind. You are a child—you don’t know anything, or not yet, not today. Or perhaps today you have begun to understand something for the first time—in which case all the better for him and for you.”
She remained bending over me in warm concern, and as if from vitreous depths I felt her words and the soothing touch of calming hands. It did me good to feel a breath of sympathy again at long, long last, and then to sense a woman’s tender, almost maternal hand so close once more. Perhaps I had gone without that too long as well, and now that I felt, through the veils of my distress, a tenderly concerned woman’s sympathy, some comfort came over me in the midst of my pain. But oh, how ashamed I was, how ashamed of that treacherous fit in which I had let out my despair! And it was against my will that, sitting up with difficulty, I brought it all out again in a rushing, stammering flood of words, all he had done to me—how he had rejected and persecuted me, then shown me kindness again, how he was harsh to me for no reason, no cause—a torturer, but one to whom ties of affection bound me, whom I hated even as I loved him and loved even as I hated him. Once more I began to work myself up to such a pitch that she had to soothe me again. Once more soft hands gently pressed me back on the ottoman from which I had jumped up in my agitation. At last I calmed down. She preserved a curiously thoughtful silence; I felt that she understood everything, perhaps even more than I did myself.
For a few minutes this silence linked us. Then she stood up. “There—now you’ve been a child long enough; you must be
a man again. Sit down at the table and have something to eat. Nothing tragic has happened—it was just a misunderstanding that will soon be cleared up.” And when I made some kind of protest, she added firmly, “It will soon be cleared up, because I’m not letting him play with you and confuse you like that any more. There must be an end to all this; he must finally learn to control himself. You’re too good for his dangerous games. I shall speak to him, trust me. But now come and have something to eat.”
Ashamed and without any volition of my own, I let her lead me back to the table. She talked of unimportant matters with a certain rapid eagerness, and I was inwardly grateful to her for seeming to ignore my wild outburst and forgetting it again. Tomorrow, she said, was Sunday, and she was going for an outing on a nearby lake with a lecturer called W and his fiancée, I ought to come too, cheer myself up, take a rest from my books. All the malaise I felt, she said, just showed that I was overworking and my nerves were overstretched; once I was in the water swimming, or out on a walk, my body would soon regain its equilibrium.
I said I would go. Anything but solitude now, anything but my room, anything but my thoughts circling in the dark. “And don’t stay in this afternoon either! Go for a stroll, take some exercise, amuse yourself!” she urged me. Strange, I thought, how she guesses at my most intimate feelings, how even though she’s a stranger to me she knows what I need and what hurts me, while I, who ought to know, fail to see it and torment myself. I told her I would do as she suggested. And looking up gratefully, I saw a new expression on her face: the mocking, lively face that sometimes gave her the look of a pert, easy-going boy had softened to a sympathetic gaze; I had never seen her so grave before. Why does he never look at me so kindly, asked something confused and yearning in me, why does he never seem to know when he is hurting me? Why has he never laid such helpful, tender hands on my hair, on my own hands? And gratefully I kissed hers, which she abruptly, almost violently withdrew. “Don’t torment yourself,” she repeated, and her voice seemed close to me.
But then her lips pressed together in a hard line again, and suddenly straightening her back she said, quietly: “Believe me, he doesn’t deserve it.”
And that almost inaudibly whispered remark struck pain into my almost pacified heart once more.
What I set out to do that afternoon and evening seems so ridiculous and childish that for years I have blushed to think of it—indeed, internal censorship was quick to blot out its memory. Well, today I am no longer ashamed of my clumsy foolishness—on the contrary, how well do I understand the impulsive, muddled ideas of the passionate youth who wanted to vault over his own confused feelings by main force.
I see myself as if at the end of a hugely long corridor, viewed through a telescope: the desperate, desolate boy climbing up to his room, not knowing what to do with himself. And then putting on another coat, bracing himself to adopt a different gait, making wild and determined gestures, and suddenly marching out into the street with a vigorously energetic tread. Yes, there I go, I recognize myself, I know every thought in the head of the poor silly, tormented boy I was then; suddenly, in front of the mirror in fact, I pulled myself together and said: “Who cares for him! To hell with him! Why should I torment myself over that old fool! She’s right—I ought to have some fun, I ought to amuse myself for once! Here goes!”
And that, indeed, was how I walked out into the street. At first it was an effort to liberate myself—then a race, a mere cowardly flight from the realization that my cheerful fun wasn’t so cheerful after all, and that block of ice still weighed as heavily on my heart as before. I still remember how I walked along, my heavy stick clasped firmly in my hand, looking keenly at every student, with a dangerous desire to pick a quarrel with someone raging in me, a wish to take out my anger, which had no outlet, on the first man I came across. But fortunately no one troubled to pay me any attention. So I made my way to the café usually frequented by my fellow students at the university, ready to sit down at their table unasked and take the slightest gibe as provocation. Once again, however, my readiness to quarrel found no object—the fine day had tempted most of them to go out of town, and the two or three sitting together greeted me civilly and gave my fevered, touchy mood not the slightest excuse to take offence. I soon rose from the table, feeling irritated, and went off to what is now no longer a dubious inn in the suburbs, where the riff-raff of the town, out for a good time, crowded close together among beer fumes and smoke to the loud music of a ladies’ wind band. I tipped two or three glasses of liquor hastily down my throat, invited a lady of easy virtue to my table along with her friend, also a hard-bitten and much painted demi-mondaine, and took a perverted pleasure in drawing attention to myself. Everyone in the little town knew me, everyone knew I was the Professor’s student, and as for the women, their bold dress and conduct made it obvious what they were—so I relished the false, silly pleasure of compromising my reputation and with it (so I foolishly thought) his too; let them all see that I don’t care for him, I thought, let them see I don’t mind what he thinks—and I paid court to my bosomy female companion in front of everyone in the most shameless and unseemly manner. I was intoxicated by my angry ill-will, and we were soon literally intoxicated too, for we drank everything indiscriminately—wine, spirits, beer—and carried on so boisterously that chairs toppled over and our neighbours prudently moved away. But I was not ashamed, on the contrary; let him hear about this, I raged foolishly, let him see how little I care for him, I’m not upset, I don’t feel injured, far from it: “Wine, more wine!” I shouted, banging my fist down on the table so that the glasses shook. Finally I left with the two women, one on my right arm, the other on my left, marching straight down the high street where the usual nine o’clock promenade brought students and their girls, citizens and military men together for a pleasant stroll—like a soiled and unsteady clover leaf, the three of us rampaged along the road making so much noise that in the end a policeman, looking annoyed, approached us and firmly told us to pipe down. I cannot describe what happened next in detail—a blue haze of strong liquor blurs my memory, I know only that, disgusted by the two intoxicated women and scarcely in control of my senses any more, I bought myself free of them, drank more coffee and cognac somewhere, and then, outside the university building, delivered myself of a tirade against all professors, for the delectation of the young fellows who gathered around me. Then, out of a vague wish to soil myself yet further and do him an injury—oh, the delusions of passionate and confused anger!—I meant to go into a house of ill repute, but I couldn’t find the way, and finally staggered sullenly home. My unsteady hand had some trouble in opening the front door of the building, and it was with difficulty that I dragged myself up the first few steps of the stairs.
But then, outside his door, all my oppressive sense of intoxication vanished as if my head had suddenly been doused in icy water. Instantly sobered, I was staring into the distorted face of my own helplessly raging foolishness. I cringed with shame. And very quietly, grovelling like a beaten dog, hoping that no one would hear me, I slunk up to my room.
I slept like the dead; when I woke, sunlight was flooding the floor and rising slowly to the edge of my bed. I got out of it with a sudden movement. Memories of the previous evening gradually came into my aching head, but I repressed the shame, I wasn’t going to feel ashamed any more. It was his fault, after all, I insisted to myself, it was all his fault that I’d been so dissolute. I calmed myself by thinking that yesterday’s events were nothing but a normal student prank, perfectly permissible in a man who had done nothing but work and work for weeks on end; but I did not feel happy with my own self-justification, and rather apprehensively I timidly went down to my teacher’s wife, remembering that I had agreed yesterday to go on her outing with her.
It was odd—no sooner did I touch the handle of his door than he was present in me again, but so too was that burning, unreasonable, churning pain, that raging despair. I knocked softly, and his wife came to let me in with a st
rangely soft expression. “What nonsense have you been up to, Roland?” she said, but sympathetically rather than reproachfully. “Why do you give yourself such a bad time?” I was taken aback: so she had already heard of my foolish conduct. But she immediately helped me to get over my embarrassment. “We’re going to be sensible today, though. Dr W and his fiancée will be here at ten, and then we’ll go out to the lake and row and swim and forget all that stupid stuff.” With great trepidation I ventured to ask, unnecessarily, whether the Professor was back yet. She looked at me without answering, and I knew for myself that it was a pointless question.
At ten sharp the lecturer arrived, a young physicist who, rather isolated himself as a Jew among the other academics, was really the only one of them who mixed with our reclusive little society; he was accompanied by his fiancée, or more likely his mistress, a young girl who was always laughing artlessly in a slightly silly way, but that made her just the right company for such an improvised excursion. First we travelled by train—eating, talking and laughing all the way—to a tiny lake nearby, and after my weeks of strenuous gravity I was so unused to any light-hearted conversation that even this one hour of it went to my head like slightly sparkling wine. Their childish high spirits succeeded entirely in diverting my thoughts from the subject that they usually circled, like bees buzzing around a darkly oozing honeycomb, and no sooner did I step into the open air and feel my muscles stretched to the full again in an improvised race with the young woman than I was the fit, carefree boy of the past once more.
Down at the lake we hired two rowing boats; my teacher’s wife steered mine, and the lecturer and his girlfriend shared the rowing between them in the other. No sooner had we pushed off than a spirit of competitive sport made us try to overtake each other. I was at a clear disadvantage, since there were two people rowing the other boat and I had to contend with them on my own, but throwing off my coat I plied the oars so vigorously, being a trained oarsman myself, that my strong strokes kept drawing us ahead. We spurred ourselves on with mocking remarks called from boat to boat, and careless of the burning July sun, indifferent to the sweat inelegantly drenching us, we laboured to outstrip one another, irrepressible galley slaves labouring in the heat of athletic pleasure. At last our goal was near, a little tree-grown tongue of land projecting into the lake, we rowed harder than ever, and to the triumph of my companion in the boat, herself in the grip of the spirit of competition, our keel was the first to ground on the beach. I climbed out, hot, perspiring, intoxicated by the unfamiliar sun, the roar of my excited blood in my veins and by the pleasure of victory—my heart was hammering away and my sweaty clothes clung close to my body. The lecturer was in no better state, and instead of earning praise for our determination in the struggle we were the object of much high-spirited mockery from the women for our breathlessness and rather pitiful appearance. At last they allowed us a respite to cool off; amidst jokes and laughter, a ladies’ changing room and a gentlemen’s changing room were improvised to the right and left of a bush. We quickly put our swimming costumes on; pale underclothes and naked arms flashed into view on the other side of the bush, and the two women were already splashing happily in the water as we men got ready too. The lecturer, less exhausted than I was myself after defeating the two of them, immediately jumped in after the ladies, but as I had rowed a little too hard and could still feel my heart thudding against my ribs I lay comfortably in the shade for a while first, enjoying the sensation of the clouds moving over me and the pleasantly sweet droning sensation of weariness surging through the circulation of my blood.