The Last Days (9 page)

They had to be patient, hold on for another six or seven months. After all, she was only thirty years old. If she looked ten years older, it was because of her illness and the pressures of life in exile. In Vienna, she would recover her youth and be known as the stylish Mrs Zweig. Who knows, perhaps some men might even decide to pay her court? Yes, the idea of being seduced delighted her. Glory to the Lord and glory to America which had given beauty back to the exiles! A reception would be given in Zweig’s honour in the great hall of the Opera. Theirs would be the first dance of the ball. They would dance, solemnly, as if they were the only couple in the world, ignoring the others as they looked on. Perhaps as other couples began to join in and as euphoria filled the room, Stefan might lean over and whisper, “I love you, Lotte… I love you,” into her ear. It would be the first time she’d ever heard him utter that phrase, and those words would be meant solely for her, Elizabeth Charlotte Zweig, and nobody else. Maybe she would pretend not to hear him? She would make him repeat it and Zweig’s lips would part again to mouth those words. She would heap blessings upon the Lord, the king of the universe, who in his great clemency had finally allowed that moment to come. Amen.

She climbed the slope that led to the house, so cheerful that she was oblivious to her panting. She was drenched in sweat and gasping for air, thanks to all that crazy running under the midday sun. What did she care? They were saved. Hallelujah! They were going to live! The 8th of December 1941. They weren’t alone any more.

She caught her breath before going in. To curb her enthusiasm. She felt feverish. She was in such a hurry to see a smile light her beloved’s face. As soon as she gave him the news, he would no doubt embrace her and plant a kiss on her lips. Perhaps—though
she preferred not to get her hopes up—he might lead her into the bedroom and they would make love right there and then, in that place, on that day, and yes, she would give birth to a child nine months later while on a ship back to Europe. She bit her lips so as not to scream with joy. She was going to be a mother!

She opened the door and took a few steps down the corridor. Her husband’s shadow loomed over the veranda. He was sitting in his armchair and appeared to be dozing. Or maybe he was in the midst of daydreaming about Clarissa, or his impossibly difficult
Balzac
. “You’ll be able to resume work on your masterpiece. The oceans will soon be safe to cross. Your precious research will leave London, cross the oceans and reach safety. You’ll have finished your
Balzac
before V-Day. The war is over, over!”

She walked on her tiptoes until she was right in front of him. No, he wasn’t sleeping. On seeing her, he smiled, using the same forced smile that no longer fooled her. At the exact moment when she’d opened her mouth to give him the news, her eyes had fallen on that day’s newspaper spread out over his knees, with its jubilant banner headline. Her eyes drifted back to her husband. The man remained impassive. Something shattered inside her. She was assailed by a feeling of great distress and confusion. How could he cling to that sad expression when the end of the nightmare had been announced? What more could he possibly want? The Resurrection of the Dead?

In a voice that still betrayed some of its former excitement, she asked:

“Have you heard the news?”

He nodded.

“Isn’t it a great day?”

He agreed that it was.

“I feel like singing and dancing…”

He told her she was right, that it was a great day. He had also felt elated that morning when Feder had come to bring him the newspaper.

“But you don’t seem…?”

Sure, he was happy, but she knew how he was, he’d never been very effusive. She knelt before him, took his hand in hers and kissed it; then, moved to tears, she murmured:

“We’re saved, isn’t that so? We’re saved…”

He kissed her fingers, ran his fingers through her hair and grasped her face between his hands. Yes, she was right, they were saved. At which point he asked her if she could leave him alone. He had to work. She got up, dried her tear-drenched face, headed towards the door and left.

I am cursed, my name is cursed, curse the day I set foot inside that office in London, the office of that great Austrian Writer, that man, that doom-monger, who is incapable of experiencing happiness. I should leave this place, yes, find salvation in escape, but where would I go? He’s led me to this prison where there are creepers instead of bears, he’s carried me off to the other side of the world and I’ve got nowhere to go, no one who’s waiting for me, I am forced to stay here, beside this marble-like being, in this tomb of unhappiness, oh yes, that’s why he’s chosen this place, a necropolis, an imperial city without an empire. I would have loved to live in New York, to stay with Eva, she and I would have danced on this day, right on Fifth Avenue, where all Jews must now be dancing, because this day is a great day, the war is over and the Lord has shown us the way, the Lord will lead us out of Germany just like he led us out of Egypt. Hitler isn’t a more formidable foe than the Pharaoh, our ordeal is at an end, the Lord has forgiven our sins and He once again holds His hand
out to His people. Yet Stefan is obviously incapable of rejoicing, since he believes in nothing, neither in God, nor in Roosevelt. Death is Stefan Zweig’s only companion.

He had kept the truth from her. He hadn’t wanted to inflict the story that Feder had told him that very morning. He hadn’t wanted to spoil her happiness. He would tell her all about it later, or, seeing as she was so fragile, maybe he wouldn’t say anything at all. He needed to protect her. Who knew how she might react? Yes, he had to warn Feder against saying anything—and if they managed to keep it quiet, she would never find out. The newspapers didn’t report those kinds of atrocities.

Feder had dropped by mid morning carrying a newspaper under his arm.

“I have some good news and some unimaginably bad news. Let’s start with the good… Here you go, read this… but don’t get ahead of yourself and cheer up too quickly.”

He had scanned the headlines and had suddenly felt pure and intense joy course through him, a feeling he hadn’t experienced for many years, a feeling that was a mix of drunkenness and relief. This state of emotion must have been clearly visible on his face since Feder had immediately jumped in and said:

“No, I told you, you’re going to regret getting so excited. Come to your senses and readopt your gloomy disposition because now you’re going to listen to what I have to tell you…”

Feder had been woken at dawn by a phone call. Albert Seldmann, a spokesman for one of the exile organizations, had rung him from New York. His voice had trembled. He had punctuated his remarks with a recurring phrase:

“All of this has been verified, you hear me, Ernst, this is the undiluted truth.”

During the first days of November, they had rounded up hundreds of Jews in each city of the Reich and herded them into big public squares. It had started with the Jews in Hamburg and the following day it had been the turn of those in Frankfurt, Bremen, then Berlin, and finally Vienna and Salzburg. They had marched the Jews to the railway stations, and after all those months of death, privations and humiliations, they had loaded them onto the trains. Once the compartments had been packed full, the trains had started off. They had crossed Germany and occupied Poland and come to a stop in Minsk. The first convoy had arrived on 10th November. All of this has been verified, this is the undiluted truth. A thousand Jews from Hamburg had been dragged to a place where the sign above the entrance had read “
Sonderghetto
”, which had been specially erected for the ghetto in Minsk. Three days after the thousand Jews from Hamburg had arrived, they had been joined by five thousand more from Frankfurt. All of this has been verified. On 18th November, a convoy from the capital had unloaded its first shipment of Jews from Berlin. That was on the same day that the first Jews from Vienna had also arrived. Three hundred Viennese Jews. In preparation for the coming influx of German Jews, all the Jews had been cleared out of the large ghetto in Minsk in order to make room for all the Reich’s Jews. They had killed ten thousand Jews over the space of five days.

This is what Albert Seldmann had told him that morning.

Feder had stopped, fixed his gaze upon his interlocutor, and then resumed:

“Do you remember that terrible novel of Bettauer’s called
The City Without Jews
?”

Zweig replied that he did. The book dated from the 1920s.

He had picked it up because the author’s name, Bettauer, had reminded him of his mother’s name. He had read the book and
hated it. The novel told a story in which Vienna’s inhabitants had expelled the Jews from the city in the name of Aryan purity. It had been an unqualified success and Bettauer had been assassinated two years following its publication.

“Well, here we are faced with same scenario,” Feder said. “The Reich is going to be cleansed of all its Jews… At this rate, there won’t be a single Jew left in Germany in a year’s time, including Vienna, of course. Can you imagine it? Not a single Jew left in Vienna or Berlin. Not a single Jew left in the whole of Germany. How is it conceivable?”

Feder stood up, turned on his heels, went away, then came back and broke into sobs in his host’s arms. While he consoled his visitor, Stefan counted the number of relatives he still had in Vienna. Nineteen cousins. Then he spared a thought for Lotte’s grandfather, the rabbi of Frankfurt.

From that moment on, he spent most of his time at home, sitting behind his makeshift desk and writing, mechanically and uninspired. He wrote like Roth used to drink, joylessly and effortlessly. He was jotting down ideas on a number of loose sheets.

He had abandoned work on his
Balzac
. He would never be up to the task. He had lost all hope that the suitcase full of papers from London would ever reach him. The ship that had been carrying it was undoubtedly lying at the bottom of the ocean, sunk by a German U-boat. Whenever he started on new stories and wrote the first few pages, he quickly tore them up. He vainly hoped to be hit by a lightning bolt of inspiration, something of the euphoria that had once gripped him every time he’d picked up a pen. Nothing sang in his soul any more.

He’d got worked up about an idea for a new novel, an ambitious project that would encompass the first half of the century and encapsulate an entire epoch, which would talk about the two wars, serve as the equivalent of an autobiography, but of course under the guise of fiction. He had begun writing it a few weeks earlier. The story commenced in 1902. It was narrated by a woman, who was also the novel’s heroine. He was satisfied with the first chapters. Yes, the book held up between 1902 and 1914. Clarissa came across as lively, affectionate, compassionate and integrated. The book was taking shape. The hundred or so pages he’d already written were a promise of things to come.

Then he suddenly lost his train of thought. His heroine’s
characteristics
faded away. Clarissa became a stranger to him. Sometimes she came across like Christine, the post-office girl, while at others she resembled Irene, the protagonist of
Fear
. Soon enough, the novel lost all semblance of a narrative structure. It didn’t look like anything any more. The chapter that covered the year 1919 came to only six pages. The section regarding the following two years amounted to only three… here is how he had described the 1920s:

That was his masterpiece! The same man who had needed fifty thousand words to narrate
Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
had now reduced ten years of someone’s life to a couple of sentences. He felt pathetic. He remembered the time when an inexhaustible stream had flowed effortlessly out of him. Worlds had been built and characters brought to life. How easy it had been for him to plumb the depths of their souls! He had looked into their pasts and foretold their futures. When he used to sit at his desk, pick up his pen and watch the miracle occur right in front of his eyes—oh, those moments when dawn would sneak up on him after a night’s work in Salzburg! These days, both his mind and his inkwell had dried up. Words evaded him and his characters slipped from his fingers. A doomsday atmosphere reigned over his inner world. There were no characters left in his mind, no children were born and no women smiled. The heart of mankind had stopped beating. His mind was a mirror image of the world of Jews. A land buried beneath smouldering ashes.

There was a knock at the door. Lotte ran to answer it, rapt by the idea that a visitor might help dispel the day’s gloominess. She thought she recognized the man standing on the front steps, but she could not recall his name. The man introduced himself. Lotte suddenly felt her spirits sink to new-found depths as she coldly ushered the visitor in and announced him, at which point she vanished into her room. Siegfried Burger, Friderike’s brother, who had been living in exile in Rio for the past few weeks, had come to pay his former brother-in-law a visit.

She heard the outburst of joy through the door. The pair must have fallen into one another’s arms. Stefan’s voice sounded
uncharacteristically happy and enthusiastic. He showered questions upon his visitor, wanting to know how he’d managed to get to Rio. Where had he fled from? Which route had he taken? How had he obtained a visa? Was the visa provisional? Where was he staying in Rio? At which point he broke into a torrent of words and began reminiscing about the past, talking about shared memories, remembering their walks in the Belvedere, receptions at the Hofburg, dinners in town, all the weeks, months and years they’d lived during Vienna’s halcyon days.