Amok and Other Stories (13 page)

“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.

I
N 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 end 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
Amo
k
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.