The Last Days (5 page)

Since he preferred exile over dishonour, he had left London for New York. After that, he had also escaped from New York. Fleeing had been his way of living in the world. Salzburg–London, London–New York, New York–Rio, and, after Rio, where next?

“There weren’t only downsides to living in London,” she smiled.

It was thanks to their London exile that they’d been able to meet. Stefan had settled there in the spring of 1934, whereas she had already been there for a year, having fled Katowice alongside her brother as soon as Hitler had come to power. In a worrying twist of irony, Friderike had introduced them to one another. His wife had insisted that Stefan hire a personal secretary to assist him during the writing of
Mary Stuart
, after having lost his former secretary, the loyal Anna Meingast. Lotte had kept silent throughout most of the interview. Had he been seduced by her shyness, the allure of her submissiveness and wide-eyed adoration, which Lotte hadn’t been able to conceal? She had only been twenty-five years old, whereas he had been in his early fifties.

As soon they’d laid eyes on one another, Friderike had been under no illusions. Yet she hadn’t become suspicious. Throughout
the many years she’d lived with the writer, she’d seen a great number of mistresses come and go. She had resigned herself to being married to a philanderer. She only demanded a little discretion. She demanded silence. With Lotte, however, things had taken an unexpected turn.

The three of them had met the previous summer at the Hôtel Westminster along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Lotte had taken a room next to the married couple’s. They had spent a month there during the summer of 1934 with Joseph Roth and Jules Romains. They had attended a concert given by their friend Toscanini at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo and taken long leisurely walks up and down the Grande Corniche. One morning in July, Friderike had gone to the consulate to see about her visa and had returned a little earlier than expected. Like a character in a bad play, she had surprised her husband and his secretary holding hands on the balcony.

A woman crossed the dining room of the Hotel Solar do Império with a spring in her step. Her hair was short and a little grizzled. She was wearing beige flannel trousers and a black shirt. Stefan could not avoid watching her silhouette glide between the tables.

“She bears a slight resemblance to Friderike,” Lotte calmly commented.

He denied it.

“Yes, something about her presence. Your wife cut quite an appearance.”

He retorted that
she
was now his wife.

“Do you miss her sometimes?”

He shook his head.

“I’m certain you miss her, or that you’re going to miss her. Maybe we shouldn’t have left New York.”

He remembered the last time he’d seen Friderike, and strange as it might seem, that encounter had happened purely by chance. They had found themselves face to face in an office on Fifth Avenue, where both parties had come to fill in their visa applications. It had been months since they’d last seen one another. He had wanted to embrace her, but hadn’t given in to his desire. He had cut the emotional outpourings short. He hated effusiveness. Was this chance encounter a sign? Were those implausible reunions just before their departure for Rio meant to make him give up his plans and stay in New York with Alma and Franz Werfel, with Thomas Mann and Jules Romains? To dwell among his people?

The waiter served the main course. They’d run out of duck with blackberry sauce and so the chef had made him a
bobó de camarão.
Stefan reacted indifferently. Lotte turned to the waiter and said:

“It’s nothing serious you know, he’s never been able to make up his mind.”

He started reminiscing about the old days. He loved to tell stories about the early hours of the new century, when he’d been a twenty-year-old in Vienna. He knew that she’d always found his anecdotes entrancing. It seemed like time travel to her, allowing her to think she too had been twenty and by his side. Sometimes, when he wasn’t in the mood, she would insist:

“Tell me one of your stories. I love it when you talk about yourself, you’re such a good storyteller. I want to know everything about you. The present and the past. I want to have been a spectator to every second of your life. I want to be you, to stand by your side, I want to have been there, at the Café Beethoven, the Burgtheater, to stroll with you in the Volksgarten, to admire Maximiliansplatz, to mount the steps of the Opera next to you, to breathe the air of Marienbad. Destiny decided I was to be
born much too late, so I want to make up for lost time, I want to know all about those years when we were apart—tell me!”

He would begin to evoke the highlights of his life. The sound of waltzes would start to resound in Lotte’s soul. Fans would start to flutter as young ladies with gloved hands and wonderful dresses leant on the arms of Imperial Army officers, dressed in their white uniforms, their chests studded with bright medals. Hearing his story, she would find herself arm in arm with him in the ballroom of the Hofburg Palace. The young couples in front of them swayed to the rhythm of the music. There were paintings by Klimt on the walls next to the portraits of the Emperor Franz Josef. Huge chandeliers burst into showers of light. She listened to him, dumbstruck, guided by his speech. They danced around his words. They relished being together, just the two of them. She heard a word slip past his lips which she’d never hitherto heard him say, and which he never said without feeling doubtful. He never said “I love you”, never promised they’d spend their whole lives together, that their love was greater than all others before it; he had never expressed the wish that a child might spring forth from her loins, a son that would bear his name, Zweig, who would be the son of Stefan Zweig and Elizabeth Charlotte Altmann, grandson of Moriz and Ida Zweig and Arthur Salomon and Sarah Eva Altmann.

All of a sudden, it was as if night had fallen outside. A swarm of black and grey clouds obscured the sky. The horizon was striped with lightning. The thunder roared. After that, the rain fell in a great crash. He told her not to be afraid. She replied that she feared nothing so long as she was by his side.

She cared little about the rain and the thunder. Her womb was still sterile. She would never feel a baby’s shrieking on her breast,
she would never cradle him sweetly in her arms. The horizon faded into the earth. He picked up his story where he’d left off. She was no longer listening to him. Her mind was elsewhere. She thought about Eva on New York’s streets. After a few minutes, the downpour came to an end. The waiter brought over the bill. Just as quickly as it had blackened, the sky was restored to an azure blue.

They left the palace. He hailed the man at his post in front of the hotel, who was holding the reins of a two-horse carriage. They started back.

H
E GOT OUT OF BED
slowly and quietly, taking care not to wake her. Once on his feet, he contemplated his features, his wrinkle-free face, bright as an opal, his long eyelashes and his wavy locks, which fell to the nape of his neck. Lotte was sleeping on her side, her right arm folded towards the corner of a pillow, as if she’d been looking for a shoulder to lie on. He admired her slender wrist, adorned by a gold bracelet he’d given her the previous night. Her body was only half-covered and her nightshirt allowed him to glimpse a figure that hadn’t lost any of its sensuality despite all the privations of exile. Her chest rose at intervals that seemed a little too close together, but her breathing was regular. For the past two weeks she had slept soundly. Her illness was kept at bay.

That place was paradise. When he woke in the middle of the night, he saw her fast asleep and breathing peacefully. The asthma attacks were a distant memory now. This place brought people back from the dead.

He felt safe. It was just a shame there were newspapers keeping him in touch with developments around the world. There was also the radio, and he understood Portuguese. Then there were letters from fellow exiles, who, having just left Europe, had sent him reports that prophesied a coming doomsday. Blood oozed from their lips.

He left the room, shut the door behind him, crossed the corridor, walked right up to the veranda and, standing behind the window, gazed at the sweeping vista that stretched before him. The valley to the west was steeped in fog. A white-satin veil hung over the maize plantations, which were lit by a few reddish hearths. The city’s houses were wrapped in a thick mist. He opened the window and filled his lungs with the sweetly scented air. The sun rose above the mountain. Everything turned crimson. Soon enough, his eyes could no longer bear the intensity of the light. He went back into the lounge and sat down in a rocking chair.

He hadn’t slept a wink that night. Even less than usual. Sleep had already eluded him for a long time. He had left his dreams behind in Austria. At night, he met with his lost loved ones. All his dear departed reached out to him from the afterlife to pay him a visit. The guests queued at his door. They talked about the rain and fine weather, they shared their foolish hopes, broke down into tears and laughed heartily.

He preferred night to day, when he would hear the voices of his nearest and dearest, even when not in bed. Regardless, he would never again hear his mother’s sweet tone, or Joseph Roth’s complaints, or experience Rathenau’s friendly smugness, Schnitzler’s melancholic smile, Rilke’s enthusiasm or Freud’s stern looks. The faces of loved ones peered out of the penumbra of the night. They were timeless moments. Sadly, the first streaks of dawn scattered their images, snuffing out their murmurs and laughter, putting an end to the past, to people, to life. Everything reverted to stony silence. Preferring the company of ghosts, he began to be frightened by the living.

His lids never closed, his eyes stayed wide open. The sleepless nights unlocked inaccessible worlds, throwing open the doors of the past. He found himself walking backwards on a bridge
suspended over a misty emptiness populated by familiar faces. He didn’t regret his sleeplessness in the slightest. Nevertheless, his insomnia began to alter his perception of reality. He counted the moments until dusk. Ghosts invited themselves along even during the day while he was in the midst of the living. He had to restrain himself from greeting them. He was afraid people would think he’d lost his mind.

That night, Joseph Roth had dropped in for a chat. Roth had been his most assiduous visitor. A bold, wretched fighter, a pathetic and glorious warrior of words. Roth was the best man among them. Neither he, Thomas Mann nor Werfel would ever be capable of writing a single chapter that had both the power and the magnitude of
The Radetzky March
. He admired the writer, the fighter, the man who threw himself head first into every struggle. He envied Roth’s despondency as much as his genius. Roth had lingered in Vienna until the last moment. Roth had fought, Roth wasn’t a coward who had holed up in the mountains of Amazonia. Stefan had envied Roth’s beginnings as well as his end. Roth had stood his ground alone, his body ravaged by absinthe, in the face of the proud, invincible soldiers pouring out of Germany. For months on end, Roth had staggered down the steps of his hotel on the Rue de Tournon, holding on to futile hopes fuelled by his drunkenness, declaring he was off to fight the armies of the Reich that were howling at France’s door. A man with a thirst for divine grace and cheap wine had braved the tidal wave of organized savagery. In his newspaper columns, lectures and meetings with French politicians—and even Chancellor Schuschnigg himself—Roth had fought against the
Anschluss
right up to the moment when the Germans marched into Vienna. In the meanwhile, Stefan hadn’t dared sign the slightest petition or pen the briefest article. He had been paralysed by the repercussions his words might incur.
Germans were plunging their spikes deep into the bellies of Jews and he hadn’t dared to speak out lest it wound up being interpreted as a provocation. He had brought shame on himself. He had never stopped supporting Roth, had even invited the writer to join him in Britain and accompany him to the United States, and had sent him money orders every three months. Friderike had looked after him in Paris, helping him up the steps of the hotel on Rue de Tournon, propping up a man who was digging himself a grave with alcohol. One day, floored by the news of Ernst Toller’s suicide in New York, Roth had died. The previous night, Friderike and Soma Morgenstern had had him moved to the Necker Hospital. On the other hand, Stefan hadn’t even had the courage to come down from London to attend the funeral service.

Roth had reappeared that night. He had slid past the curtains and sat down next to the bed. He was holding a glass in his hand and was pouring himself large whiskies while his body trembled from tip to toe. On that night, the writer had come to enquire after his wife’s health. Roth’s wife, a schizophrenic, was also called Friederike.

“Is it true what the exiles are saying?” Roth had asked him.

Carried by a doom-laden voice that had risen out of the depths of the netherworld, Stefan had heard a rumour louder than all the war drums. He hadn’t believed his ears. Could it be that such terror, suffering, savagery, hate and inhumanity had rained down on a single human being, especially one as innocent as Friederike Roth, one whose mind had been torn to shreds ever since she’d fallen prey to madness in 1929? Had the German monsters really done what people were accusing them of? Had they really euthanized poor Friederike? Roth’s body shook with painful and protracted tremors.

“No, it’s not true,” Zweig had murmured, “you shouldn’t
believe everything doomsayers tell you. They have a tendency to make horrors sound even more horrible. You know how Germans are, they are capable of the worst, but would they go to such extremes? What would they care about hunting down and overpowering such a lost, simple soul in the grips of madness? Germans extol the virtues of warriors, and celebrate the rights of the strong over the weak. Do you think that the Germans would detract their attention from the conquest of the world to chase after someone as poor and weak as Friederike Roth? Rest in peace, my dear Roth, in your world of tranquillity, goodness and solicitude, our promised land.”

“You’ve put my mind at ease,” Roth had whispered. “Is there any news of her then other than these abject lies?”

“My dear Joseph, have no fear, they were able to rescue your wife. She’s doing well. She’s in Switzerland, we helped her cross the border and she is safe from those demons coming out of Germany, as well as the ones haunting her soul. A psychiatrist is looking after her in a Geneva clinic.”

“Good thing she’s in Switzerland, she’ll be all right. Blessed are the Swiss who take us in and dress our wounds. Do you know the doctor’s name?”

“Yes, it’s Alfred Döblin, our dear Alfred, that great physician, that renowned writer, the one who looked after her in Berlin and referred her to Dr Bernstein, a disciple of Freud, and who looks after those of us who’ve lost their minds down here.”

“If he’s a disciple of Freud, then she’s saved.”

Then they had talked about their work.

“One day,” Roth’s voice had said, “you’re going to read my latest novella, you’re going to like it, it’s written in your style, and I think I’m going to call it
Job
. What about you? Are you writing? We must write, we must write books that are flame-proof.”

He had replied that he was in the middle of finishing his autobiography.

“That’s good,” Roth had said approvingly, “tell your readers about what our world was once like, be a witness to your times, we must be witnesses. An autobiography, that’s good.”

“You’re in the right place for that.”

“You’ve always kept me in a special place in your heart. You’ve always been there for… I’m happy to go on my journey now that I know that my wife, my little lost one, is finally able to sleep in peace.”

After that, dawn had arrived.

Now that he’d woken up, he pondered Friederike Roth’s destiny. Married to Roth and a schizophrenic, she’d been hunted down by the Gestapo, who after looking for her in Berlin, had finally tracked her down in Munich, after someone blew the whistle on her. The exile community had related how the Gestapo had surprised her in a tiny deserted flat, huddled up, having lost all faculties of speech, in a room plunged in darkness. The SS had grabbed her by the wrists and, since she’d clung to herself tightly, emitting long frightened, demented cries, they had pistol-whipped her and dragged her broken body out while a faint breath of life still coursed through it. They had led her to a truck where they’d kept other madmen, some of whom were howling, while others were immured behind a wall of silence. The truck had driven into the middle of the woods, right up to a magnificent building on the outskirts of Linz, the psychiatric hospital of Linz, an establishment that had been renowned in the late 1920s. Mrs Roth had woken up in a room filled with dozens of other mentally ill patients. In the midst of terrified cries, they had come to collect her, as well as other tortured souls. They had led Mrs Roth into a bare room
and under the Nazi policy “Aktion T4”, which aimed to eliminate patients suffering with mental illnesses, they had administered an injection of strychnine. Friederike Roth had been murdered.

Zweig rose and gave one last thought to his friend. At least he’d been spared all of this.

They had purchased tickets for Rio. The train would leave Petrópolis at ten o’clock. They would reach Rio in time for lunch. They waited on the small station’s deserted platform. Stefan was wearing his beige suit, while Lotte wore a pale-blue cotton dress. He was carrying a bulky folder under his arm. He looked worriedly around him.

“No one’s going to steal anything from you, you know,” she said mockingly.

Her comment cheered him up for a few seconds, then he reverted to a sombre disposition. Two adolescents were crossing the platform just a few metres ahead of him. He took three steps back and clenched the folder tightly.

“You’re not running any risks. Who’s going to steal a manuscript? People barely have enough to eat.”

It was a joke, but she knew how important the manuscript was to him. She understood his fear of losing it. In a way, it was as if he were holding his life in his hands. The book spoke of a world that didn’t exist any more outside the memories of a few people. That world had been annihilated. Who else would have been able to tell the story of that defunct era? Who would have the genius to bring its splendour back to life? He was the last, the only one who could pass this light on to future generations. This book was almost a relic.

She was intimately acquainted with each and every sentence. Some phrases had been etched into her soul: “So I ask my
memories to speak and choose for me, and give at least some faint reflection of my life before it sinks into the dark.” She had read all his books. He had never before written anything as beautiful and profound, or as silvery and sad.

She was the one who had typed up each page on her old Remington. She had typed out the title,
The World of Yesterday
. He was still dithering over the title. He thought about calling it
Lost Generation, Memoirs of a European
or
My Three Lives
. They had worked for six months on that book. She thought “they” because, yes, she’d had a role in its shaping. Stefan would draft it in his notebooks, whose loose leaves she would then type up. He would reread the pages, make his corrections and scrawl endless additions in the margins. She would then retype the corrected text.

She said: “It’s good as it is, it’s perfect, there’s nothing left to change, it’s your best book yet.”

He went back to work, spent whole days and nights correcting the text. He worked tirelessly and never seemed satisfied after reading each version. No, he would explain, that isn’t worthy of what I experienced. The trick is to describe both the light and the shadows, war and peace, the grandeur and the decadence. He wrecked his health writing that book, and slightly lost his mind over it too.

He had begun work on his memoirs in New York, but had felt incapable of remembering each episode of his life and then piecing them together like a jigsaw puzzle. He’d usually had a number of notes at his disposal and worked in libraries. But he had nothing that might help jog his memory. He had then thought of seeing Friderike again. Worse still, he had chosen to up sticks and leave town so as to rekindle his relationship with his ex-wife. Stefan and Lotte had left New York and relocated to a sad, dingy hotel in the
town of Ossining, for the sole reason that Friderike lived in the vicinity. Stefan would leave their hotel room each morning and go to meet his ex-wife. He excused himself by blaming his failing memory. He was forced to draw from the well of his ex-wife’s memories. He would leave in the morning and come back in the evening. Nothing carnal went on between them, Lotte knew that. It was even worse than that. Picturing him by her side as they walked hand in hand down the road of their radiant past was more terrible than the thought of them sharing a bed. The following day she’d worn her eyes out staring at her Remington and experienced the same dread as if she’d witnessed them embracing. Friderike
knew everything, remembered everything
. There had only ever been one Mrs Zweig and this book would stand as a testament to that until the end of time. Lotte didn’t belong to the world of yesterday. That book was her coffin, and she’d even nailed the planks together. Stefan and Friderike had known each other for thirty years—by contrast, what did the few years he and Lotte had spent together really amount to? Friderike von Winternitz had witnessed all of his moments of glory, his triumphs, the rapturous welcomes he’d received in Berlin, Paris and Rome. Friderike was the one who’d known the gates of Viennese palaces, the staircases adorned with flowers, the sound of violins, of orchestras, valets in their red livery, the dresses cut of pink tulle, the flamboyant hairstyles, the lacy shawls, the velour ribbons, wrists weighed down by bracelets, the opening bars of music and the intoxicating dances, fine pearls hung round necks, the sophisticated dishes that were served, boudoirs where suitors whispered words of love while mazurkas played in the background, small salons and great excitement, palaces in Switzerland and trips in first class, private theatre boxes that were both peaceful and curtained off by dusky red curtains, the hours of great successes, the immortal moment of the initial
thrills, the magic cast by the first laurels. Friderike was the one who’d savoured the honours, the sweet words of praise, seen the future throw open its doors, the marble palaces, the proud palominos galloping through the cool evening breeze. Lotte instead had been dealt the bottomless pits of despair, the terror-stricken visions, the path of exile, third-class compartments, the shabby bungalows and the rattling carriages pulled by donkeys. She had teetered between indifference on the one hand and despair on the other. The worst had been saved for last: five years after Stefan and Friderike had divorced, here he was running after her again. Reliving what they’d already experienced.