The Last Days (3 page)

It had been a long time since her medication had had any effect on her asthma. Every night, around two o’clock in the morning, Stefan had been forced to look on, powerless, as his young wife gasped for air, hovering on the brink of asphyxiation, sitting on the window sill and looking as though she had wanted to breathe all the world’s air into her lungs. The continents they’d travelled through, the succession of hotel rooms and the endless uncertainties had accentuated her illness. Just as they had lacked for space throughout their exile, clean air had also been in short supply. Air had been a precious commodity for her. Now they had nowhere left to hide and their finances had run dry. They were even running out of oxygen.

They decided to go out to lunch. Lotte was wearing the beige silk dress she’d purchased in New York the previous month, a few days before they’d boarded the ship for Brazil. They had been living at the Wyndham Hotel on 25th Street, a corner of tranquillity they’d grown very fond of. America had initially looked
welcoming
. A second life in the New World. They had landed in New York at the end of June 1940, while the Britain they’d left behind was collapsing under the brunt of the German bombing raids. They had enjoyed a few days of happiness, but they had once again had to apply for visas, filling in a great number of forms,
asking for references, simply to prove they had the right to exist, even to be there, living in the midst of constant uncertainty and temporary solutions. America hadn’t really turned out to be the promised land everyone claimed it was. The more Lotte’s asthma worsened, the more their liveliness was sapped. She started having coughing fits. At night, doctors would be at her bedside injecting drugs into her veins. Unfortunately, all that New York air wasn’t clean enough for her lungs. Or maybe all the wind stopped at the city limits. Or the breeze that blew over the Hudson was too weak. Or it was all too late and there wasn’t any hope left for her. She had contracted that terrible influenza. The fever had made her lose her mind. They had thought she’d been at death’s door. He’d spent a whole night nestled by her side on that hospital bed. When she had regained consciousness, she’d heard him mutter some words—but maybe her fever was making her hallucinate? He’d spoken into the abyss, stricken with grief. Her lips had trembled. She’d sworn he’d been addressing the dead, entreating them, telling them about his regrets. He felt remorse for having dragged his wife along on this escapade. His muttering had soothed her. She had fallen asleep lulled by the sound of his voice. After a few days, the fever had calmed down and she no longer wheezed like a coffee pot. Warmth flowed back into her fingertips. She was cured. Those frightening weeks had furnished them with ultimate proof that they didn’t belong in New York.

It was a shame as she would have gladly stayed, even though the weather didn’t do her any good, even though the lethargy of urban life and car pollution were asphyxiating her. Manhattan was enchanting. At the end of a night’s coughing fit, she had seen the city stir and spring to life by the light of dawn through her hotel window. She had gone down to the street. Walking past those skyscrapers had given her vertigo. Everything looked
intensely romantic. The streets pulsed with power and a feeling of the unreal. The men and women who crossed her path looked like a new type of human being, one that inspired admiration. In the thick of those crowds, behind those tall walls, she’d imagined herself as the lead actress in a film, a colour film whose images superimposed themselves on the black scenes of that German film. She’d loved losing herself in the crowds on Fifth Avenue at closing time, when employees filed out of their offices—even though she still nursed the terrifying memory of those organized German masses and their outstretched arms. She had strolled through Central Park. The shadows cast by those towers didn’t frighten her in the slightest. When a ray of light would slide between two buildings, she would tell herself that the light had fallen from the sky. She would stand still in the middle of the pavement, her head craned up to those heights, her eyes half-shut, wrapped in that celestial brightness. Someone bumped into her. She scurried back to the shadows. She didn’t like anyone touching her. The brutal touch of strangers sent the noise of footsteps on the pavement, the shouting of the uniformed mobs, resonating through her mind, which she believed was just as ill as her body. She took a little sidestep and found herself once again in the light, where the air became lighter, where life became lighter.

In New York, Lotte had met up with Eva, her niece, who was the daughter of Manfred, her brother. Eva and Manfred were all that was left of her family. Her mother, uncles, aunts and cousins had chosen to stay in Frankfurt and Katowice, the town in Silesia where Lotte was from and which she had fled in 1933. She hadn’t heard from any of them in nearly a year. The courier must not have got through, Stefan had argued.

Lotte had seen her mother staring at her out of Eva’s eyes. The resemblance was striking. According to tradition, granddaughters
bore their grandmother’s names. When Lotte had walked through the streets of Brooklyn with Eva, it had been as if she’d been strolling arm in arm with her mother around the Jewish quarter in Katowice. The department stores’ window displays, the restaurant patios and cafés had filled the adolescent with wonder and awe. On seeing the happiness of someone she still thought of as a child, Lotte rediscovered a feeling of insouciance. Eva’s peals of laughter effaced the memory of Stefan’s bottomless anguish. She forgot about the endless flow of handwritten pages which Stefan produced as he neared the completion of his autobiography, pages that Lotte would have to type out on an old Remington, some of whose keys were broken, working day after day without ever taking a break. She had worn her eyes out trying to understand each of the writer’s words, querying the meaning behind every deletion and judging whether his constructions were well balanced. She valued her eyesight highly. All that travelling as well as her illness hadn’t prematurely aged them, but the hours she spent reading that manuscript were going to damage them in the long run. Nevertheless, what did she care about her eyesight when all was said and done, so long as she was by his side?

Eva and Lotte had spent one last day together in Manhattan before the couple left for Rio. They had sat down on a restaurant’s patio. Three young Americans lunching at a nearby table had come over to ask if the ladies would care to join them. The episode lasted only a few minutes, but it sent a wave of sensual pleasure rippling through them.

They had gone into a little shop on the corner of 42nd Street and Madison Avenue, a tailor’s emporium whose window displayed sumptuous dresses at affordable prices. Lotte had hesitated on the threshold and Eva had dragged her in. Lotte needed a dress for her new life in Brazil. On entering the boutique the
tailor, a short, corpulent man who was very elegantly attired, had welcomed them as though they’d been oriental princesses. He had brought them some tea and unwrapped entire collections for them.

“You know, people are wrong not to buy any suits and dresses. They’re going to need them for V-Day. Because we’re going to win, and when I say ‘we’, I mean the ‘People of the Book’. Can the Book-Burning People stand a chance against us?… By the sound of your accent I would say that you’re from… Cologne?… Frankfurt and Katowice? Me, I’m from Stuttgart… And when did you leave behind that dear motherland of ours that devours its children? Thirty-Three—you’re a real oracle aren’t you! I waited until Thirty-Six, and, what’s worse, I left my daughter Gilda there. Her husband didn’t want to leave. He said the situation couldn’t get any worse… what an idiot that Ernst Rosenthal was! My wife had predicted he wouldn’t be a good husband, my dear Masha, may her soul rest in peace, she didn’t survive the journey. Right after Hermann Flechner got here, having left his son behind in Munich, they were all deported out east. East, as if that were a place fit for Jews!? As soon as the war’s over, I’m going to box that Ernst Rosenthal’s ears… You know, in Frankfurt I attended my cousin Rivkah’s wedding in the big synagogue on Börnestrasse… What’s that? Your father was that synagogue’s rabbi? What a small… Here we are in August 1941 in New York and you tell me that your grandfather wed Rivkah and Franz Hesen, may his soul rest in peace. Franz met his end when the SA threw him out of a window in May 1933. Is there really no such thing as fate, madam? I haven’t even asked you your name madam… Zweig… Do you mean to say you’re Mrs Stefan Zweig? Please forgive me, I must sit down, this is all a bit too much for me, first your grandfather officiates at my cousin’s wedding, then you tell me all those books my daughter devours were written by your
husband. Forgive me, I must seem a little too joyful considering the dark times we live in, but you should be wary of
appearances
, I’m no fool, I know all too well what the Reich does to our people, but were I to fall into melancholia, I might as well go ahead and close my shop, and then what would I do with the remainder of my days, without my wife and daughter? Nor am I going to spend all day waiting at Ellis Island, since they have shut the great gates, the gates of the mighty Reich and the gates of America. My daughter won’t stroll into my shop tomorrow. So I stick to dressmaking, but while that’s all well and good, I’m not uncultured, and I can recognize a great writer when I see one, and what’s more I’ve seen a photograph of him in the newspaper. Your husband is a man of rare elegance, please tell him to drop by, you know Max Wurmberg also does menswear, I have pure wool suits that are like the ones the best sewing shops in Berlin used to turn out, not than anyone wants to remember Berlin these days… You know, I only exhibit dresses in my windows because the future belongs to dressmakers, that is if there’s any future for dressmakers at all. I prefer not to think about the future too much, that’s what fooled Ernst Rosenthal… One day or another, the great Roosevelt is finally going to declare war, I only hope that when he does decide to send his troops over, my little Gilda will still be alive. It’s already August 1941, and if he keeps on waiting, I don’t know what part of Poland they’re going to find her in. It’s just that, you see, I would like to be a grandfather, look over here in this box, it’s a coat for the baby, with a brocaded velvet exterior, and cotton jersey on the inside. It’s for my grandson, look, I’ve stitched his name on the sleeves, he’s going to be called Max, just like me, according to our forefathers’ tradition.”

He had broken off to search for a dress at the back of the cupboard, saying that it was his favourite, and that he’d set it
aside for his daughter, although Gilda would never dare wear it. It was a low-cut red dress that left the back almost naked. Lotte had tried it on, albeit a little reluctantly. The dressmaker had lingered in front of her, on his knees, sticking needles through the cloth and adjusting it. He hadn’t spared any compliments when praising her slender figure, her curves, her long legs. He had promised the dress would be ready before their departure.

“You’re going to look marvellous, Mrs Zweig, you already look marvellous, look at those hips, those shoulders, you’re a dream woman, you deserve the greatest of men.”

Then they took their leave.

“You’re going to look sublime in your red dress…” Eva had exclaimed.

Lotte hadn’t reacted. She walked like a robot, with a faraway look in her eyes.

“On the beach at Copacabana…” Eva had continued.

Lotte couldn’t picture herself strolling on a beach. Neither could she imagine her husband walking with her by the edge of the sea. She would undoubtedly never wear that dress.

“You’ll be in Brazil in a few days! You don’t seem all too happy about it.”

Happiness wasn’t a word she was accustomed to. Ever since she’d been a teenager, she had thought of joy as vague and out of reach. She wasn’t like the other girls. She had known that from an early age. She had the impression that the other girls were happier, more lively and more radiant. She dwelt in shadowy fringes. These days it was easier, people both praised and resented her—after all, she lived in Stefan Zweig’s shadow! She would never wear that dress. Her body had always seemed foreign to her. It was a sterile land. Then where did all her hopelessness, which left her feeling lifeless, come from? She’d had a happy and unproblematic
childhood. Her father had doted on her, her brother had loved her and her mother had cherished her. They had looked after all her needs. They hadn’t denied her anything. Yet nothing but sorrow and suffering emerged from the unreal lands of her
childhood
. She had always been pervaded by a feeling of defeat. Her respiratory ailment had suited her perfectly as she hadn’t needed to adapt to it. She had always felt out of breath, wherever she had happened to be at the time, at home or at school. She had watched her family getting on with the business of living, heard her friends laugh and looked on as the days passed by. She would lock herself in her room, but nothing would happen. She ignored all happiness. She was well acquainted with fear in all its guises. She was afraid of the unknown, of the future, of not doing the right thing, of coming unstuck as well as succeeding; she was also scared of death, of illness, of other people and of fear itself, to the point that even the slightest thing would frighten her to the core. Life had always been like a test, one she found increasingly difficult to succeed at. The grip this misfortune exercised on her had caused her to stumble through those unhappy years. There was no doubt that Lotte had found herself quite at home in her husband’s bleak outlook on the world.

“You are the most envied of women, the wife of this century’s greatest writer… and you’re now the owner of the prettiest dress in Manhattan!”

“Stefan will barely notice the dress. He hardly notices when I’m around.”

“But you’re the reason he left his wife.”

That had just been a pretext… At the time, she must have seemed like a fountain of youth. Witnessing his own energies dissipate, he had hoped to draw on her vigour, not unlike when he had heeded a so-called doctor’s advice, who had prescribed
him a course of hormones that were supposed to slow down the effects of old age. Alas, against all hope, Lotte had become just another responsibility, yet another burden. As though their life weren’t dangerous enough, stifling and shrivelled as it was, marrying her had gifted him with the promise of terrifying nights. What did he feel for her? Nothing but pity.