by Stefan Zweig
How sadly he spoke, his voice full of tenderness and shame; the trembling note in it went to my heart. I was ashamed of myself for preserving so cold, so unfeelingly frosty a silence before this man who had given me more than anyone alive, and who now so pointlessly humbled himself before me. My soul burned to say something comforting to him, but my trembling lips would not obey me. And so I sat awkwardly there, wretchedly shifting in my chair until, almost angrily, he tried to cheer me. “Don’t sit there like that, Roland, in such dreadful silence … pull yourself together. Is it really so terrible? Are you so ashamed of me? It’s all over now, you see, I have told you everything … let us at least say goodbye properly as two men, two friends should.”
But I still had no power over myself. He touched my arm. “Come, Roland, sit down beside me. I feel easier now that you know, now that there’s honesty between us at last … At first I kept fearing you might guess how dear you are to me … then I hoped you would feel it for yourself, so that I would be spared this confession … but now it has happened, now I am free, and now I can speak to you as I have never spoken to another living soul. For you have been closer to me than anyone else in all these years, I have loved you as I loved no one before you … Like no one else, my child, you have awakened the last spark in me. So as we part you should also know more of me than anyone else does. In all our time together I have felt your silent questioning so clearly … you alone shall know my full story. Do you want me to tell it to you?”
He saw my assent in my glance, in my confused and shattered expression.
“Come close then … come close to me. I cannot say such things out loud.” I leaned forward—devoutly, I can only say. But no sooner was I sitting opposite him waiting, listening, than he rose again. “No, this won’t do … you mustn’t look at me or … or I can’t talk about it.” And he put out his hand to turn off the light.
Darkness fell over us. I sensed him near me, knew it from his breathing which somewhere passed into the unseen heavily, almost stertorously. And suddenly a voice rose in the air between us and told me the whole story of his life.
Since that evening when the man I so venerated opened up like a shell that had been tightly closed and told me his story, since that evening forty years ago, everything our writers and poets present as extraordinary in books, everything shown on stage as tragic drama, has seemed to me trivial and unimportant. Is it through complacency, cowardice, or because they take too short a view that they speak of nothing but the superficial, brightly lit plane of life where the senses openly and lawfully have room to play, while below in the vaults, in the deep caves and sewers of the heart, the true dangerous beasts of passion roam, glowing with phosphorescent light, coupling unseen and tearing each other apart in every fantastic form of convolution? Does the breath of those beasts alarm them, the hot and tearing breath of demonic urges, the exhalations of the burning blood, do they fear to dirty their dainty hands on the ulcers of humanity, or does their gaze, used to a more muted light, not find its way down the slippery, dangerous steps that drip with decay? And yet to those who truly know, no lust is like the lust for the hidden, no horror so primevally forceful as that which quivers around danger, no suffering more sacred than that which cannot express itself for shame.
But here a man was disclosing himself to me exactly as he was, opening up his inmost thoughts, eager to bare his battered, poisoned, burnt and festering heart. A wild delight like that of a flagellant tormented itself in the confession he had kept back for so many years. Only a man who had been ashamed all his life, cowering and hiding, could launch with such intoxication and so overwhelmed into so pitiless a confession. He was tearing the life from his breast piecemeal, and in that hour the boy I then was looked down for the first time into the unimaginable depths of human emotion.
At first his voice hovered in the room as if disembodied, an indistinct haze of agitation, uncertainly hinting at secret events, yet this laborious control of passion in itself made me divine the force it was to show, just as when you hear certain markedly decelerating bars of music, foreshadowing a rapid rhythm, you feel the furioso in your nerves in advance. But then images began to flicker up, raised trembling by the inner storm of passion and gradually showing in the light. I saw a boy at first, a shy and introverted boy who dared not speak to his comrades, but who felt a confused, a physically demanding longing for the best-looking boys at the school. However, when he approached one too affectionately he was firmly repelled, a second mocked him with cruel clarity, and worse still, the two of them revealed his outlandish desires to the other boys. At once a unanimous kangaroo court ostracized the confused boy with scorn and humiliation from their cheerful company, as if he were a leper. His way to school became a daily penance, and his nights were disturbed by the self-disgust of one marked out early as a pariah, feeling that his perverse desires, although so far they featured only in his dreams, denoted insanity and were a shameful vice.
His voice trembled uncertainly as he told the tale—for a moment it seemed about to fade away in the darkness. But a sigh raised it again, and new images rose from the gloomy haze, ranged one by one, shadowy and ghostly. The boy became a student in Berlin, and for the first time the underworld of the city offered him a chance to satisfy the inclinations he had so long controlled—but how soiled their satisfaction was by disgust, how poisoned by fear!—those surreptitious encounters on dark street corners, in the shadows of railway stations and bridges, how poor a thing was their twitching lust, how dreadful did the danger make them, most of them ending wretchedly in blackmail and always leaving a slimy snail-trail of cold fear behind for weeks! The way to hell lay between darkness and light—while the crystal element of the intellect cleansed the scholar in the bright light of the industrious day, the evening always impelled the passionate man towards the dregs of the outskirts of town, the community of questionable companions avoiding any policeman’s spiked helmet, and took him into gloomy beer cellars whose dubious doors opened only to a certain kind of smile. And he had to steel his will to hide this double life with care, to conceal his Medusa-like secret from any strange gaze, to preserve the impeccably grave and dignified demeanour of a junior lecturer by day, only to wander incognito by night in the underworld of shameful adventures pursued by the light of flickering lamps. Again and again the tormented man strained to master a passion which diverged from the accustomed track by applying the lash of self-control, again and again his instincts impelled him towards the dark and dangerous. Ten, twelve, fifteen years of nerve-racking struggles with the invisibly magnetic power of his incurable inclination were like a single convulsion. He felt satisfaction without enjoyment, he felt choking shame, and came to be aware of the dark aspect, timidly concealed in itself, of his fear of his own passions.
At last, quite late, after his thirtieth year, he made a violent attempt to force his life round to the right track. At the home of a relative he met his future wife, a young girl who, vaguely attracted by the mystery clinging about him, offered him genuine affection. And for once her boyish body and youthfully spirited bearing managed, briefly, to deceive his passion. Their fleeting relationship conquered his resistance to all things feminine, he overcame it for the first time, and hoping that thanks to this attraction he would be able to master his misdirected inclinations, impatient to chain himself fast when for once he had found a prop against his inner propensity for the dangerous, and having made a full admission of it to her first, he quickly married the girl. Now he thought the way back to those terrible zones would be barred to him. For a few brief weeks he was carefree, but soon the new stimulus proved ineffective and his original longings became insistent and overpowering. From then on the girl whom he had disappointed and who disappointed him served only as a façade to conceal his revived inclinations. Once again he walked his perilous way on the edge of the law and society, looking down into the dark dangers below.
And a particular torment was added to his inner confusion: he was offered a position where
such inclinations as his are a curse. A junior lecturer, who soon became a full professor, he was professionally obliged to be constantly involved with young men, and temptation kept placing new blooms of youth in front of him, ephebes of an invisible gymnasion within the world of Prussian conventionality. And all of them—another curse, another danger!—loved him passionately without seeing the face of Eros behind their teacher’s mask, they were happy when his comradely but secretly trembling hand touched them, they lavished enthusiasm on a man who had to keep strict control over himself. His were the torments of Tantalus: to be harsh to those who pressed their admiration on him, to fight a never-ending battle with his own weakness! And when he felt that he had almost succumbed to temptation he always suddenly took flight. Those were the escapades whose lightning advent and recurrence had so confused me: now I saw that the terrible way he took was a means of flight from himself, a flight into the horrors of chasms and crooked alleys. He always went to some large metropolis where he would find intimates haunting the wrong side of the tracks, men of the lower classes whose encounters besmirched him, whorish youths instead of young men of elevated and upright minds, but this disgust, this mire, this vileness, this poisonously mordant disappointment was necessary if he were to be sure of resisting the lure of his senses at home, in the close, trusting circle of his students. Ah, what encounters—what ghostly yet malodorously earthly figures his confession conjured up before my eyes! For this distinguished intellectual, in whom a sense of the beauty of form was as natural and necessary as breath, this master of all emotions was fated to encounter ultimate humiliation in low dives, smoky and smouldering, which admitted only initiates; he knew the impudent demands of rent boys with made-up faces, the sugary familiarity of perfumed barbers’ assistants, the excited giggling of transvestites in women’s skirts, the rabid greed of itinerant actors, the coarse affection of tobacco-chewing sail-ors—all these crooked, intimidated, perverse, fantastic forms in which the sexual instinct, wandering from the usual way, seeks and knows itself in the meaner areas of big cities. He had encountered all kinds of humiliation, ignominy and vileness on these slippery paths; several times he had been robbed of everything on him (being too weak and too high-minded to scuffle with a coarse groom), he had been left without his watch, without his coat, and in addition was spurned by his drunken comrade when he returned to their shady hotel on the city outskirts. Blackmailers had got their claws into him, one of them had dogged his footsteps at the university for months, sitting boldly in the front row of the audience and glancing up with a sly smile at the professor known all over town who, trembling to see the man’s knowing winks, could deliver his lecture only with a great effort. Once—my heart stood still when he confessed this too—once he had been picked up by the police in a disreputable bar in Berlin at midnight with a whole gang of such fellows; a stout, red-cheeked sergeant took down the trembling man’s name and position with the scornful, superior smile of a subaltern suddenly able to put on airs in front of an intellectual, graciously indicating at last that this time he was being let off with a caution, but henceforward his name would be on a certain list. And as a man who has sat too long in bars that smell of liquor finds its odour clinging at last to his clothes, so rumours and gossip gradually went round here in his own town, beginning in some place that could not be traced; it was the same as in his class at school—in the company of his colleagues their conversation and greetings to him became ostentatiously more and more frosty, until here too a glazed and transparent area of alienation cut the isolated man off from all of them. And even in the safety of his home, behind many locked doors, he still felt he was being spied on and known for what he was.
But this tormented, fearful heart was never offered the grace of pure friendship by a nobly minded man, the worthy return of a virile and powerful affection: he always had to divide his feelings into below and above, his tender longings for his young and intellectual students at the university, and those companions hired in the dark of whom he would think with revulsion next morning. Never, as he began to age, did he experience a pure inclination, a youth’s wholehearted affection for him, and weary of disappointment, his nerves worn out by struggling through this thorny thicket, he had resigned himself to the idea that he was done for, when suddenly a young man came into his life who showed a passionate liking for him, ageing as he was, who willingly offered up his words, his whole being, who felt ardently for him—and he, unsuspectingly overwhelmed, now faced in alarm the miracle for which he had no longer hoped, feeling himself unworthy now of such a pure, spontaneously offered gift. Once again a messenger of youth had appeared, a handsome form and a passionate mind burning for him with intellectual fire, affectionately bound to him by a link of sympathy, thirsting for his liking, and with no idea of its own danger. With the torch of Eros in his guileless soul, bold and innocent as Parsifal the holy fool, this youth bent close to the poisoned wound, unaware of his magic or that even his arrival brought healing—it was the boy for whom he had waited so long, for all his life, and who came into it too late, at the last sunset hour.
And as he described this figure his voice rose from the darkness. A lightness seemed to come into it, a deep sound of affection lent it music as that eloquent mouth spoke of the young man, his late-come love. I trembled with excitement and sympathy, but suddenly—my heart was struck as if by a hammer. For that ardent young man of whom my teacher spoke was … was … shame sprang to my cheeks … was I myself: I saw myself step forward as if out of a burning mirror, enveloped in such a radiance of undivined love that its reflection singed me. Yes, I was the young man—more and more closely I recognized myself, my urgent enthusiasm, my fanatical desire to be close to him, the ecstasy of yearning for which the intellect was not enough, I was the foolish, wild boy who, unaware of his power, had roused the burgeoning seeds of creativity once again in the withdrawn scholar, had once again inflamed the torch of Eros in his soul as its weary flame burned low. In amazement I now realized what I, who had felt so timid, meant to him, it was my headlong impetuosity that he loved as the most sacrosanct surprise of his old age—and with a shudder I also saw how powerfully his will had fought with me: for from me of all people, whom he loved purely, he did not want to experience rejection and contempt, the horror of insulted physicality, or see this last grace granted by cruel Fortune made a lustful plaything for the senses. That was why he resisted my persistence so firmly, poured sudden cold water ironically over my overflowing emotions, sharply added a note of conventional rigour to soft and friendly conversations, restrained the hand reaching tenderly out—for my sake alone he forced himself to all the brusque behaviour meant to sober me up and preserve him, conduct which had distressed my mind for weeks. The confused devastation of the night when, in the dream world of his overpowered senses, he had climbed the creaking stair to save himself and our friendship with those hurtful remarks was cruelly clear to me now. And shuddering, gripped, moved as if in a fever, overflowing with pity, I understood how he had suffered for my sake, how heroically he had controlled himself for me.
That voice in the darkness, ah, that voice in the darkness, how I felt it penetrate my inmost breast! There was a note in it such as I had never heard before and have never heard since, a note drawn from depths that the average life never plumbs. A man speaks thus only once in his life to another, to fall silent then for ever, as in the legend of the swan which is said to be capable of raising its hoarse voice in song only once, when it is dying. And I received that fervent, ardently urgent voice pressing on with its tale into me with a shuddering and painful sensation, as a woman takes a man into herself.
Then, suddenly, the voice fell silent, and there was nothing but darkness between us. I knew he was close to me. I had only to lift my hand and reach out to touch him. And I felt a powerful urge to comfort the suffering man.
But then he made a movement. The light came on. Tired, old and tormented, a figure rose from his chair—an exhausted old man slowly approached me. “Good
bye, Roland—not another word between us now! I am glad you came—and we must both be glad that you are going … goodbye. And—let me kiss you as we say farewell.”
As if impelled by some magic power I stumbled towards him. That smouldering light, usually hidden as if by drifting mists, was now glowing openly in his eyes; burning flames rose from them. He drew me close, his lips pressed mine thirstily, nervously, and with a trembling convulsion he held my body close to his.
It was a kiss such as I have never received from a woman, a kiss as wild and desperate as a deathly cry. The trembling of his body passed into me. I shuddered, in the strange grip of a terrible sensation—responding with my soul, yet deeply alarmed by the defensive reaction of my body when touched by a man—I responded with an eerie confusion of feeling which stretched those few seconds out into a dizzying length of time.
Then he let go of me—with a sudden movement as if a body were being violently torn apart—turned with difficulty and threw himself into his chair, his back to me. Perfectly rigid, he leaned forward into the empty air for a few moments. But gradually his head became too heavy, he bent it first more wearily, more dully, and then his brow, like something too weighty swaying for a while and then suddenly falling, dropped to the desktop with a hollow, dry sound.
Infinite waves of pity surged through me. Involuntarily I stepped closer. But then, suddenly, he straightened his bent spine, and as he turned back his hoarse voice, dull and admonitory, groaned from the cup of his clenched hands: “Go away! Go away! Don’t … don’t come near me … for God’s sake, for both our sakes, go now, go!”
I understood. And I retreated, shuddering; I left that beloved room like a man in flight.