The Last Days (12 page)

Stefan was reluctant to answer, to argue, to hurt his host’s feelings, to defend the indefensible. It would undoubtedly be wise to say, “Yes Mr Bernanos, you’re right, we’re all in the same boat, all men are possessed with steely resolve and a rebel soul, humanity is made up of heroes like you, all of whom are endowed with a free will, follow one faith, are indestructible demigods fighting the forces of evil with flowers rather than guns.” Yet he couldn’t say these things out loud. Before he even knew what had happened, he’d felt his lips move and had thanked his host for his words and said that he felt supremely honoured to have heard them. But Bernanos was wrong. Nobody in the world, not even in this distant corner of it, needed to hear Stefan Zweig’s words, nor read any of his writing. Besides, would people really be able to hear his words above the din of battle? How would his quavering, plaintive voice fare against the Führer’s roaring rants and Goebbels’s howls? Or his blubbering versus the shrill cries of Stukas or the barking of dogs? How loud would his voice be when he dragged it out of the dark well of despair? It would be lost to the wind. How could Bernanos possibly expect it would reach the shores of Europe? One word from him and the gates of
hell would be thrown open? And what did he have to say anyway, what was his message? He was sorry to come across as a coward, but he hadn’t changed his mind in thirty years; he had stayed true to Romain Rolland’s call to pacifism in 1914. He would remain “above the fray”, even if Rolland himself had since rescinded his pacifism. Rolland would for ever remain a sage, a beacon of Enlightenment. As he spoke, he recalled a few remarks Rolland had made in his letter to him: “I don’t see you settling down in Brazil. It’s far too late in our lives to put down roots again, and without any roots, we’ll turn into shadows.”

Stefan felt like a shadow. He no longer had the strength to make himself heard. He’d travelled too much, wandered too much, suffered too many delusions, too many regrets, too many bouts of nostalgia. He had shared all he’d known, and written down all the little white lies that he’d cooked up in his dreams. He thought the well of eternal truths in his soul had dried up and that no stone had been left unturned. What was more—and Bernanos knew this well—he’d never had a warrior’s temperament. The Mitteleuropa Stefan had written about had been a place of poets, dreamers, an enchanted world, a children’s fairy tale. The pages of history that were being written today described a black wedding. Picking a fight with the Devil? He was too old for that, he lacked both the strength and the determination. The slightest breeze knocked him over and they expected him to stand up to Hitler’s armies! The SS soldiers would double over in laughter faced with an enemy like him. His despair had burnt the bridge connecting him to the world of men. He was washed up, he no longer believed in anything. He envied his host’s inexhaustible energy as much as he envied Jules Romains’s fighting spirit. Humanity needed men like them. But what could they possibly need him for? He was nothing but deadweight. Perhaps that was why everything he’d
ever loved and stood for had been blown away. He was destined to disappear and that was for the best. Maybe this was the price he had to pay for victory? There would be no place for him in the new world that would arise from the ruins of the present. He no longer found pleasure in writing, nor did he engage in conversation with enthusiasm. Making his voice heard? All he wanted was silence.

Bernanos made no reply. Lotte stepped in to fill the silence the conversation had left in its wake. She asked whether life had been harsh in those untamed lands. They spoke about raising horses and planting manioc. After a long time, Stefan broke his silence. He asked Lotte what time they needed to catch the train home. He was tired. He wanted to be back home before it got too late.

The train inched forwards in the blackness of the night. Stefan hadn’t managed to rid himself of the anger that his meeting with Bernanos had plunged him in. He had thought visiting him would fire him up and act as a soothing balm. Yet the opposite result had been achieved. Bernanos had lectured him and he’d had to defend himself. He was his own worst advocate. Once again, he had expressed only a fraction of his thoughts. Truth be told, his work had always been fuelled by defeatism rather than pacifism. As far as he was concerned, the defeated were sublime beings who occupied a moral high ground. The humiliated were superior to the master race. How could he get that message across? People expected him to speak like a liberator from glorious heights—General Zweig, commander in chief of the vanquished, the ragged, the annihilated, as they marched towards death, advancing in serried ranks, silently, dumbstruck by the sheer scale of the efforts that had been made to wipe them
out; the commander of a pious race, petrified in the face of endless barbarism, a race that had been wrung from the plains of Poland and captured on the spot—a child lifting its eyes towards a man in black filled with absolute hatred who aimed his rifle in his direction, a mother stunned by the unprecedented horrors unrolling before her eyes, old men stumbling in the cold, whole families mown down by machine-gun fire. General Zweig at the head of the army of the dead, is that what Bernanos wanted? He thought about his first published short story, “In the Snow”, which he’d published in 1901 at the age of twenty in Theodor Herzl’s
Die Welt.
Yes, although he hated nationalism in all its guises, he had published his first story in a Zionist newspaper. He had always preferred the tragic destiny of Jews in exile over the proud destiny that the tribe of Israel had been promised once they’d returned to their ancestral land. What had he written in that first novella, which had been published over forty years ago, back at the beginning of that promising century, drunk on the promise of a glorious tomorrow? What had he written in 1900 when everyone else his age had been busy writing love poems? “In the Snow”! The story of a ghetto on the outskirts of a German town close to the Polish border during the Middle Ages. A poor, isolated Jewish community, an inward-looking community that devoutly worshipped its God, terrified by the thought that the world around them might overhear their prayers. Finally, one night, a messenger arrives with frightening news: the “Flagellants” were coming, wave after wave of them advancing towards the ghetto in serried ranks, drunk on hate and baying for Jewish blood. Having ransacked the countryside, the Flagellants, who were to Germany what Cossacks were to Russia, had pillaged the surrounding shtetls, wiping out its inhabitants. Yes, he had been only twenty years old—the finest age to be—and he had written
it at the beginning of a century that promised to be even brighter than the age of Enlightenment, the most liberating century of all time. As happy as a German Jew could be. The young Stefan had gone back to the fourteenth century, the time of the Flagellants, the time of rural horrors, the time of small massacres, the time of the Black Death, the time before the pogroms; he retraced his little Jewish community’s origins, and where did he lead it as it fled the advancing German hordes? He followed them into Poland, yes, he followed those poor wretches as they pushed their sleighs through the Polish plains while being hunted down by the German hordes. And what had the young Stefan, who was now a toothless old coward, heard? He’d heard the sobbing of those distraught women, the children’s persistent cries, the roaring of a storm brooding on the horizon, the cacophony of moans and anguished howls. What had the young ambitious Stefan, who dreamt of literary glories and transient loves, seen? He had seen the snow thickly cover everything in that sharp cold, slowing the advance of the wagons and freezing both the horses and their masters.
And their fear of death turns to hopeless resignation
. Those had been the exact words he’d written as a twenty-year-old. The funeral song that the storm had hummed and the glacial cold that had annihilated the fugitives. The German Jews who had perished due to the cold on their way to the Polish paradise.
Josua holds his fiancée with cold hands. She is dead already, although he does not know it.

The icy casket that was Poland. The biggest mass grave in the world. That had been his first published work, a twenty-year-old’s bleak vision, the freezing winding sheet of Israel.

Lotte felt compelled to pull him out of his depression:

“Tell me one of your stories, it’s very cold in this compartment, warm me up with one of your stories. I love it when you
tell me one of your stories. Share an episode of your life with me, something you’ve never told anyone else.”

Was that because the train had passed by a village where the cross on top of the church loomed high above the roofs of houses? His memory led him down a road towards a village in Alsace. The image of Gunsbach came back to him, as did that of a man whom he had once loved. His face lit up. In a clear voice, he began telling Lotte about his last meeting with Albert Schweitzer. It had taken place many years earlier—and how unforgettable it had been. After having visited the cathedral in Strasbourg, Stefan had boarded the train for Colmar with a couple of friends, then taken a bus in order to reach the village of Gunsbach. That was where the celebrated physician—who besides being a great humanist was also a renowned musicologist—had lived. Schweitzer, a virtuoso pianist, who had written a remarkable study on Bach, had told his guests he would play a few pieces for them. He’d had Gunsbach’s church opened and had begun playing with his long, slender fingers on an organ that had been built according to his own specifications. The bars of one of the Advent Cantatas had resounded in the nave. It had been a moment of overwhelming peace. While Schweitzer’s hands had played the keys, a divine presence had inhabited the chapel.

He paused and, suddenly excited, asked Lotte whether he’d ever told her about his meeting with Rodin in Paris in 1905. “No, no,” she lied, “you’ve never told me that story, tell me all about it!” In the middle of the cold, dark night, Stefan told her that story, which she’d already heard him tell a hundred times before over various dinners; about when he’d been invited to the great sculptor’s home when still a young man, and about the unbelievable spectacle he’d been privileged to witness. Forgetting his guest’s presence, the genius had stood surrounded by his sculptures
and had begun touching up the statue of a woman with a putty knife. After he’d told her about Rodin, he moved on to Jaurès, Rilke, Alma Mahler and Maurice Ravel. The more they travelled through the night, the more a light drew out entire swathes of Stefan’s life from oblivion; and the closer they drew to dawn, the brighter Vienna shone. By the time the train had begun to slow down, Lotte, who was still listening enraptured, believed herself an oriental princess who was being told a thousand and one tales.

Around eight o’clock that evening, Feder came to pay them a visit. As usual, the Berliner had brought his host a book that he’d purchased for him in Rio. But Zweig no longer read any contemporary authors. He was taken up with rereading
The Human Comedy
, had resumed work on a German rendition of Homer, was in the middle of reading a selection of Shakespeare’s plays and was leisurely rereading Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister.

“Now I know the books you would take with you on a desert island,” Feder observed.

They were already living on a desert island.

“Let us recap: Montaigne, Goethe, Homer, Shakespeare,
Balzac. I can’t see anything more to add to them. The Bible, maybe… Well, I’ve brought you the latest Thomas Mann,
Lotte in Weimar.”

This had been one of the last books that a British newspaper had commissioned Stefan to review. He had written to Mann to express his admiration and promised to send him the review once it had been published. Yet it had never come to pass. He had fled from London and had never written to Thomas Mann again. He was fed up with all those lies and sycophancy. He had
been ashamed by all those words of praise in his piece. Truth be told, he had hated the Nobel laureate’s novel, the account of Goethe’s last meeting with Lotte, his childhood sweetheart, in Weimar, the same Lotte who served as inspiration for the heroine in
The Sorrows of Young Werther.
He had abhorred the manner in which Mann had treated his subject, its coldness, that descriptive exhaustiveness. The whole novel had read like the minutes of a boring meeting. In his own works, Zweig had always dismissed getting the facts straight, and had claimed the right to portray reality in a subjective way. He had never tried fully to define his subjects, or to place them within definitive boundaries. He wasn’t a geologist. He was only interested in fragmentary perspectives. He saw himself as an Impressionist. What good would a certificate of authenticity amount to? First and foremost, he was interested in the emotional impulses that made his characters tick. He knew that one couldn’t reduce a man to the visible facts of his life. On the contrary, one had to employ one’s elective affinities with one’s subject in order to establish an intimate bond, to deal in shades of grey rather than in revealed truths.

“It’s funny to notice how the choices you made as a writer reveal your true inner nature. Mann opted to write about Goethe, while you chose to focus on Kleist and Nietzsche. You look for a path through the darkness and wander from country to country, with neither children nor a fixed address, and now you’ve buried yourself away in this godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, Mann proceeds full steam ahead. Mann surrounds himself with people and protects himself. He has placed himself at the crossroads so as to watch all comings and goings, he’s the sun around which everyone else revolves. Whereas you have escaped to a place where nothing happens and have reached a point of no return. Mann is planning his reconquest of the literary world.
Mann is busy building a statue to himself, while concealing his true nature. Mann will never own up to his pederastic inclinations. Mann conceals anything that might compromise his public image. Mann sees himself as peerless. Mann looks for light and finds it in Thomas Mann. On the other hand, here you are doing your utmost to disappear.”