Journey Into the Past (2 page)

The language here may seem a touch too fluent, but it does suggest that the past has ways of reaching into the present and from there into the future to make us the playthings of time. Shadows know more about us than we know ourselves, are more like us than we care to know. They reach into areas where we fear to tread, bear their own secrets, tell their own tales, speak their own tongue. They even foretell what is likely to happen and, as Freud knew so well, reinvent what might have happened and perhaps did indeed happen—who’s to know. Shadows are how we grope and speak of time when we’ve run out of time.

Not surprising, then, that Zweig’s
Journey into the Past
should, like
The World of Yesterday
, also end with shadows. It begins at twilight and it ends at twilight, blurred in perpetual soft focus. Even the history of the tale’s publication—it comes out in the United States for the first time this year, almost seventy years after Zweig’s death—bears all the marks of a shadow from the past that happens to be
about
shadows from the past.

A fragment of the novella, identified as such, was first published in 1929 in an anthology of short fiction by Austrian writers. But a longer version, in typescript with handwritten corrections by Zweig, was discovered in London after his death and subsequently published to great acclaim in Germany, France, and Great Britain. The typescript bore two titles:
Wider-stand der Wirklichkeit
(Resistance to Reality) and
Die Reise in die Vergangenheit
( Journey Into the Past), the latter of which, however, Zweig crossed out. It is difficult to date the final composition of this novella, but it would not be unwise to place it after 1933, once the hold of the Nazi Party seemed secure.

The story itself is, at first, irresistibly formulaic, so readable and fluent that it smacks of a B-grade, black-and-white Hollywood romance from the 1930s or ’40s. A man and woman are on a train headed for Heidelberg. It soon becomes clear that this is a moment both have been looking forward to. They have chosen to remain silent, partly because the compartment is full but also because they are too hesitant to speak the truth that sits between them. Then, as in so many films, the screen starts to blur, and we move back in time and see the young man a decade earlier. He comes from extremely humble origins, studies chemistry, is hired by an industrial magnate, and “initially given menial tasks to perform in the laboratory.” From there the hasty rise of the ambitious young man about to become a most trusted assistant follows a script laid down by Balzac and Dickens—authors to whom Zweig had devoted many pages in
Master Builders of the Spirit
. The young man, Ludwig, is then asked to reside in the home of the industrialist. Reluctantly, he accepts. Within a short period of time, he falls silently in love with the boss’s wife, and she with him, but before anything desired and unavoidable occurs between them, the young man is asked to move to Mexico for two years to manage a mining concern for the German industrialist. It is on hearing of Ludwig’s impending departure that the wife suddenly lets down her guard and allows her feelings for the young man to erupt. He cannot hide his feelings, either. The physical proximity of the lovers, which might have led to one thing only in Stendhal, finds itself hampered as in any of Racine’s plays by crippling inhibitions and by the perpetual presence of the husband and hired help. “Not now! Not here! I beg you!” she stammers, almost on the point of surrender. That
almost
, which spells “silent consent” and intimacy before the act, becomes the lodestar of their unconsummated love. They, too, now enter a shadowland of their own invention.

Ludwig leaves, and in Mexico counts down the days, the weeks, the months. They write incessantly and clearly feed off the feverish letters each sends the other. Then the worst happens. In Mexico the young man learns that war has broken out in Europe. It is 1914. He cannot go back and all correspondence between them comes to a sudden halt.

The screen blurs again and it is nine years later. Ludwig lives in Mexico, is married, and has children. Now, for the first time since leaving before the war, he returns to Germany on business. This, by my calculation, must be 1923. It is also the year of Hitler’s attempted coup in Munich.

The
almost
-lovers finally do meet; she is older, a widow, lives alone. But nothing else has changed. The house is the same, the help is the same, even her telephone number is the same; to his surprise, Ludwig is completely able to resurrect his age-old feelings of inadequacy as a young man when he had first stepped into that house. He thought he’d outgrown the feeling, what with being a married father and a wealthy businessman in his own right now; but if parts of us move on and grow older, others stay frozen still and don’t budge, won’t grow, won’t live, won’t die. We exist on several parallel time lines; sometimes those lines cross, sometimes they don’t touch, and sometimes each withdraws as though shoved by a “ghostly mist.” Nothing has changed—nothing—and yet things couldn’t be more strained between the lovers. “People may grow old,” she finally says in a moment of candor, “but they remain the same.” “Everything is as it used to be,” he will almost concur during an uncomfortable moment between them, only to add, “except for us, except for us!” But an instant afterward, as if to dispel his cruel quip, he will ask: “Do you still remember?” And she will right away reply: “I have not forgotten either.” For all their undiminished love, however, everything seems to have chilled between them. He asks to revisit his old room in the house. She shows him upstairs. This is where they had kissed and hugged and where she promised to offer herself. Now complete discomfort sits between them. With nothing more to add, they say goodbye. The next day, however, he asks to see her for one last time. “People come back,” says the author-Lothario in
Letter from an Unknown Woman.
“Yes, they do come back, but they’ve forgotten,” replies the woman who has loved him and only him.

Unable to dispel the strain between them, together they decide to take a train to revisit Heidelberg as they had once done years earlier. It is a desultory trip down memory lane; both know it will be their last. It’s the evening. They are tense and uneasy with themselves, with each other, while something forever “unrelieved and unresolved” hovers between them. After nine years apart, rather than longing for the arrival at Heidelberg, they keep hoping the journey might never end:

She feels no different. “A pity it’s over,” she says referring to the train ride, “it was so pleasant, just riding along like that. I could have gone on for hours and hours.”

If their stifling discomfort has not unraveled any hope, the scene on the streets that evening nips all signs of lingering romance: Nazi youths, bearing swastikas, “chins defiantly jutting” and “marching with athletic firmness, carrying ... the banners of the Reich waving in the wind,” “four abreast ... goose-stepping along, feet thudding heavily on the ground.” Suddenly, everything is stamped with disquieting signals of the unavoidable war to come. The lovers, who have finally survived one war, are only too prescient of the next. Time is running out—on Europe, on them. There won’t be second chances.

Unable to stand the “jubilant hurrahs from the huge mob,” they check into a hotel, which he claims someone had recommended. The stultifying, quasi-seedy bedroom bears “the unseen trace of other guests,” while its “unmade double bed bore visible witness to the point and purpose of this room.” The lovers feel hampered, awkward, nervous, embarrassed, self-conscious—these kinds of words suddenly teem upon the pages and reflect Zweig’s stunning psychological acuity. Where other writers would have glossed over the lovers’ inhibition and gotten down to the nitty-gritty after paying a nodding tribute to their
gêne
, Zweig doesn’t give them this out. Like Joyce at the very end of “The Dead,” like Yourcenar’s father in “The First Evening,” and like Flaubert’s brilliant closing pages of
Sentimental Education
, Zweig is the master of ineffable states of being. Ludwig’s dear beloved will do anything he pleases, with both passion and reluctance, but he dares not ask, doesn’t know what or how to ask, can almost hear her old words that had once spelled consent and diffidence: “Not now! Not here!” Thwarted by their own silence, they decide to leave the hotel bedroom to “go for a little walk.”

Nothing has changed between them. Time hasn’t changed them, either. But time, as though still heeding an ancient interdiction that couldn’t possibly apply to the lovers any longer, has stood still and both of them are frozen. Time has happened to them.

When Ludwig had first entered her house on returning to Germany, he was instantly made aware of these bewildering temporal crosscurrents, a “double sentiment which kept confusing both the past and the present.” “I lived in this house,” he thought, “something of me lingers here, something of those years, the whole of me is not yet at home across the ocean, and I still do not live entirely in my own world.” He is literally dislodged from the present and thrown back into the past; but if he is able to understand how uncanny such a feeling must be, it’s because he also knows that he should not feel it at all, since another part of him now thrives in Mexico. This is not just about the confusion of sentiments, nor is it about desire or renunciation; it is about the confusion of what Eliot called “time’s covenant.”

Something far more profound and disturbing but more elusive yet is occurring, and it begins to emerge as they walk out of their hotel and make their way through an empty road studded by trees and lampposts with a view of the curving river below. There they observe how their shadows seem to merge then drift apart then merge again as the two come in and out of the light from each lamppost, “parting again only to embrace once more,” two “soulless figures, shadowy bodies that were only the reflection of their own,” “wanting to come back to life but unable to do so now.”

Ludwig is aware that some meaning is struggling to reveal itself, that this game of shadows, which draw closer and move apart, says more about what is happening, has happened, may never happen—he doesn’t know. We are indeed in a shadowland strewn with wild
if onlys.
We become ghosts before we die.

And suddenly, Ludwig remembers Verlaine’s poem, “Colloque sentimental.” She had read it to him years ago, almost prophetically, because the words of Verlaine’s lovers, who are lovers no more and may never be again, could just as easily apply to Zweig’s penumbral, “disembodied” almost-lovers now. “Beloved and out of reach,” now as she had been years earlier, she had once read the poem to him because reading from a printed page prevented either from uttering words they were both craving but reluctant to speak—because reading the words in French in her dimly lit living room in Germany had given them the necessary distance to confide just about everything yet feign not to have grasped any of it. As they’re walking on the pavement now, he catches himself misquoting the very same verses back to her. In Verlaine’s poem, one of the lovers speaks nostalgically of the past, using the informal
tu
. The other, ever so terse and withdrawn, asks “why should I remember anything,” using the more formal and indifferent
vous
.

On hearing the words of Verlaine, without saying a word she places the room key in his hand. She has forgotten nothing. But he does not speak. “‘What’s the matter, Ludwig? What are you thinking of?’ But he merely dismissed it, saying, ‘Nothing, nothing!’” He might as well be using the disembodied
vous
to her humbled
tu
. “And he listened yet more intently to what was within him, to the past, to see whether that voice of memory truly foretelling the future would not speak to him again, revealing the present to him as well as the past.”

But the voice does not speak, or we will never know what it might finally say. What we do know is that these two, like Verlaine’s erstwhile lovers, are locked in their eternal colloquy in a cold park. If they do not move, it is not for fear of spoiling the moment or of being disappointed, it is not even inhibition that holds them back. Rather, it is because time can and does indeed commit terrible crimes. It will kill the very best in us and insist that we are still alive.

—ANDRÉ ACIMAN

T
here you are
!” He went to meet her with arms outstretched, almost flung wide. “There you are,” he repeated, his voice climbing the scale from surprise to delight ever more clearly, while his tender glance lingered on her beloved form. “I was almost afraid you wouldn’t come!”

“Do you really have so little faith in me?” But only her lips playfully uttered this mild reproach, smiling. Her blue eyes lit up, shining with confidence.

“No, not that, I never doubted that—what in this world can be relied on more than your word? But think how foolish I was—suddenly this afternoon, entirely unexpectedly, I can’t think why, I felt a spasm of senseless fear. I was afraid something could have happened to you. I wanted to send you a telegram, I wanted to go to you, and just now, when the hands of the clock moved on and still I didn’t see you, I was horribly afraid we might miss each other yet again. But thank God, you’re here now—”

“Yes, I’m here,” she smiled, and once more a star shone brightly from the depths of those blue eyes. “I’m here and I’m ready. Shall we go?”