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:
He felt a kind of bridal expectation, sweet and sensuous yet vaguely mingled with anticipatory fear and its own fulfilment, with the mysterious shiver felt when something endlessly desired suddenly comes physically close to the astonished heart ... Oh, to stay like this for hours longer, for an eternity, in this continuous twilight ...
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
JOURNEY INTO THE PAST
There 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?”
“Yes, let’s go,” his lips automatically echoed her. But his motionless body did not move a step, again and again his loving gaze lingered on her incredible presence. Above them, to right and left, the railway tracks of Frankfurt Central Station clanged and clanked with the noise of iron and glass, shrill whistling cut through the tumult in the smoky concourse, twenty boards imperiously displayed different departure and arrival times, complete with the hours and the minutes, while in the maelstrom of the busy crowd he fel
t that she was the only person really present, removed from time and space in a strange trance of passionate bemusement. In the end she had to remind him, “It’s high time we left, Ludwig, we haven’t bought tickets yet.” Only then did his fixed gaze move away from her, and he took her arm with tender reverence.
The evening express to Heidelberg was unusually full. Disappointed in their expectation that first-class tickets would get them a compartment to themselves, after looking around in vain they finally chose one occupied only by a single grey-haired gentleman leaning back in a corner, half asleep. They were already pleasurably looking forward to an intimate conversation when, shortly before the whistle blew for the train to leave, three more gentlemen strode into the compartment, out of breath and carrying bulging briefcases. The three newcomers were obviously lawyers, in such a state of animation over a trial which had just ended that their lively discussion entirely ruled out the chance of any further conversation, so the couple resigned themselves to sitting opposite one another without saying a word. Only when one of them looked up did he or she see, in the uncertain shade cast like a dark cloud by the lamp, the other’s tender glance lovingly looking that way.
With a slight jolt, the train began to move. The rattling of the wheels drowned out the legal conversation, muting it to mere noise. But then, gradually, the jolting and rattling turned to a rhythmic swaying, like a steel cradle rocking the couple into dreams. And while the rattling wheels invisible below them rolled onward, into a future that each of them imagined differently, the thoughts of both returned in reverie to the past.
They had recently met again after an interval of more than nine years. Separated all that time by unimaginable distance, they now felt this first silent intimacy with redoubled force. Dear God, how long and how far apart they had been—nine years and four thousand days had passed between then and this day, this night! How much time, how much lost time, and yet in the space of a second a single thought took him back to the very beginning. What had it been like? He remembered every detail; he had first entered her house as a young man of twenty-three, the curve of his lips covered by the soft down of a young beard. Struggling free early from a childhood of humiliating poverty, growing up as the recipient of free meals provided by charity, he had made his way by giving private tuition, and was embittered before his time by deprivation and the meagre living that was all he earned. Scraping together pennies during his day’s work to buy books, studying by night with weary, over-strained nerves, he had completed his studies of chemistry with distinction and, equipped with his professor’s special recommendation, he had gone to see the famous industrialist G, distinguished by the honorary title of Privy Councillor and director of the big factory in Frankfurt-am-Main. There he was initially given menial tasks to perform in the laboratory, but soon the Councillor became aware of the serious tenacity of this young man, who immersed himself in his work with all the pent-up force of single-minded determination, and he began taking a particular interest in him. By way of testing his new assistant he gave him increasingly responsible work, and the young man, seeing the possibility of escaping from the dismal prison of poverty, eagerly seized his chance. The more work he was given, the more energetically he tackled it, so that in a very short time he rose from being one of dozens of assistants to becoming his employer’s right-hand man, trusted to conduct secret experiments, his “young friend”, as the Councillor benevolently liked to call him. For although the young man did not know it, a probing mind inside the private door of the director’s office was assessing his suitability for higher things, and while the ambitious assistant thought he was merely mastering his daily work in a mood of furious energy, his almost invisible employer had him marked out for a great future. For some years now the ageing Councillor, who was often kept at home and sometimes even in bed by his very painful sciatica, had been looking for a totally reliable and intellectually well-qualified private secretary, a man to whom he could turn for discussion of the firm’s most confidential patents, as well as those experiments that had to be made with all the requisite discretion. And at last he seemed to have found him. One day he put an unexpected proposition to the startled young man: how would he like to give up the furnished room he rented in the suburbs, and take up residence in Councillor G’s spacious villa, where he would be closer to hand for his employer? The young man was surprised by this proposition, coming as it did out of the blue, but the Councillor was even more surprised when, after a day spent thinking it over, the young man firmly declined the honour of his employer’s offer, rather clumsily hiding his outright refusal behind thin excuses. Eminent scientist as the Councillor was in his own field, he did not have enough psychological experience to guess the true reason for this refusal, and the defiant young man may not even have acknowledged it to himself. It was, in fact, a kind of perverted pride, the painful sense of shame left by a childhood spent in dire poverty. Coming to adulthood as a private tutor in the distastefully ostentatious houses of the nouveaux riches, feeling that he was a nameless hybrid being somewhere between a servant and a companion, part and yet not part of the household, an ornamental item like the magnolias on the table, placed there and then cleared away again as required, he found himself brimming over with hatred for his employers and the sphere in which they lived, the heavy, ponderous furniture, the lavishly decorated rooms, the over-rich meals, all the wealth that he shared only on sufferance. He had gone through much in those houses: the hurtful remarks of impertinent children; the even more hurtful pity of the lady of the house when she handed him a few banknotes at the end of the month; the ironic, mocking looks of the maids, who were always ready to be cruel to the upper servants, when he moved into a new house with his plain wooden trunk and had to hang his only suit and put away his grey, darned underwear, that infallible sign of poverty, in a wardrobe that was not his own. No, never again, he had sworn to himself, he would never live in a strange house again, never go back to riches until they belonged to him, never again let his neediness show, or allow presents tactlessly given to hurt his feelings. Never, never again. Outwardly his title of Doctor, cheap but impenetrable armour, made up for his low social status, and at the office his fine achievements disguised the still sore and festering wounds of his youth, when he had felt ashamed of his poverty and of taking charity. So no, he was not going to sell the handful of freedom he now had, his jealously guarded privacy, not for any sum of money. And he declined the flattering invitation, even at the risk of wrecking his career, with excuses and evasions.
Soon, however, unforeseen circumstances left him no choice. The Councillor’s state of health deteriorated so much that he had to spend a long time bedridden, and could not even keep in touch with his office by telephone. The presence of a private secretary now became an urgent necessity and finally, if the young man did not want to lose his job, he could no longer resist his employer’s repeated and pressing requests. God knows, he thought, the move to the villa had been difficult for him; he still clearly remembered the day when he first rang the bell of the grand house, which was rather in the old Franconian style, in the Bockenheimer Landstrasse The evening before, so that his poverty would not be too obvious, he had hastily bought new underwear, a reasonably good black suit and new shoes, spending his savings on them—and those savings were meagre, for on his salary, which was not high, he was also keeping an old mother and two sisters in a remote provincial town. And this time a hired man delivered the ugly trunk containing his earthly goods ahead of him—the trunk that he hated because of all the memories it brought back. All the same, discomfort rose like some thick obstruction in his throat when a white-gloved servant formally opened the door to him, and even in the front hall he met with the satiated, self-satisfied atmosphere of wealth. Deep-piled carpets that softly swallowed up his footsteps were waiting, tapestries hung on the walls even in the hall, demanding solemn study, there were carved wooden doors with heavy bronze handles, clearly not intended to be touched by a visitor’s own hand but opened by a
respectfully bowing servant. In his defiantly bitter mood, he found all this oppressive. It was both heady and unwelcome. And when the servant showed him into the guest-room with its three windows, the place intended as his permanent residence, his sense of being an intruder who was out of place here gained the upper hand. Yesterday he had been living in a draughty little fourth-floor back room, with a wooden bedstead and a tin basin to wash in, and now he was supposed to make himself at home here, where every item of the furnishings seemed boldly opulent, aware of its monetary value, and looked back at him with scorn as a man who was merely tolerated here. All he had brought with him, even he himself in his own clothes, shrank to miserable proportions in this spacious, well-lit room. His one coat, ridiculously occupying the big, wide wardrobe, looked like a hanged man; his few washing things and his shabby shaving kit lay on the roomy, marble-tiled wash-stand like something he had coughed up or a tool carelessly left there by a workman; and instinctively he threw a shawl over the hard, ugly wooden trunk, envying it for its ability to lie in hiding here, while he himself stood inside these four walls like a burglar caught in the act. In vain he tried to counter his ashamed, angry sense of being nothing by reminding himself that he had been specifically asked for, pressingly invited to come. But the comfortable solidity of the items around him kept demolishing his arguments. He felt small again, insignificant, of no account in the face of this ostentatious, magnificent world of money, servants, flunkeys and other hangers-on, human furniture that had been bought and could be lent out. It was as if his own nature had been stolen from him. And now, when the servant tapped lightly at the door and appeared, his face frozen and his bearing stiff, to announce that the lady of the house had sent to ask if the doctor would call on her, he felt, as he hesitantly followed the man through the suite of rooms, that for the first time in years his stature was shrinking, his shoulders already stooping into an obsequious bow, and after a gap of years the uncertainty and confusion he had known as a boy revived in him.