Klaus lost his cool. What are you doing? he said.
His seriousness made me laugh even more, Sabina went on. I couldn’t help it. It was his birthday yesterday, Sabina said, so we had a lovely time, out for dinner in that Russian restaurant. And then I did such a stupid thing this morning. Like the intimacy between us, that bubble we were in last night, she said, was suddenly destroyed.
Oh my God, Sabina said, I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. What I wanted to say was just – how easy it is to be misunderstood.
You know – it happens every time. I cry afterwards and then I go into a swirl of giddiness the following day. They shouldn’t let me drive the car. Do not operate heavy machinery. My head is in a complete daze, it’s unreal. For him it’s different. He goes into a deep sadness. He’s like a blackbird gone silent. He puts on all this sombre music. Something hopelessly dark and tragic. Usually it’s Mahler. Or Górecki. Guess what he put on this morning, she said, full volume. It was that song about a woman getting shot by the river. Down by the river – I shot my baby, she said, quoting the lyrics of the song. I know it doesn’t mean he literally shoots her. I completely get it. It’s just the way a man thinks about love, like it becomes weaponized. Maybe I’m reading too much into this. But still and all, she said – shot her dead.
Nobody knew what to say.
They sat for a moment without anyone speaking. Each one of them reflecting. Some of them stood up to get coffee and dessert. Julia asked if they would like the strudel heated up – I have some fresh mint leaves if anyone wants tea.
41
Here is the novel that most closely resembles Roth’s own marriage. His true masterpiece, that small book he wrote later in his short life, knowing how little time was left to him as a writer on the run from the Nazis. Das falsche Gewicht. Weights and Measures. The story of a government official sent to a small town on the Russian border to take charge of verifying the people’s honesty. The town, not unlike my author’s own birthplace of Brody, thrives on falsehood and corruption at a time when the empire is coming to an end and the new era of nationalism approaches. Eibenschütz is an isolated man, despised by the rest of the community, fighting a lonely battle to uphold standards of truth in a world where order has begun to fall apart around him.
When he discovers that his own wife is being unfaithful to him, his life descends into chaos. She gives birth to a baby boy and pretends it belongs to him. Devastated by this betrayal, he then falls in love with a young Gypsy woman at one of the most notorious smuggling bars. He begins to drink heavily and finds himself joining in with the community, entering into the life of falsehood he has been sent to clean up. Loose and free as any chestnut roaster travelling across borders with his dog and cart.
An epidemic begins to sweep through the country.
He receives a letter informing him that his son is dead and his wife is dying. He goes to visit her and finds her in bed in the care of a nun. She stretches out her arms to say that she has always loved him – do I need to die? He wants to do something kind for her, play some music, perhaps, in her dying moments. He paces up and down in the room, listening to the sound of her body shuddering in the bed. He looks out at the murky rain falling and horse-drawn trucks passing the house, driven by men wearing black hoods, laden with bodies on their way to a communal grave. The hospitals are overcrowded and people are left to die at home. A single candle stands lit on a round table, like the only sign of goodness left in the room. His wife reaches out to him with a searing cry as she dies. He moves towards her, wishing to hold her hand at least, but the nun tells him to stand back. He breaks down sobbing and takes out the bottle from his pocket.
And what about Rebellion?
Yanis brought the book club back on track.
For him, the man with the barrel organ was the perfect example of the person on the periphery. His happiness is brought to an end by a racist.
You think it’s an allegory for racism? Renate asked.
It’s the story of the outsider, Yanis said. The newcomer on our streets. Downgraded to cleaning up after other men in the toilets of a restaurant.
As a book, Yanis continued, I found myself comparing it to Ulysses. James Joyce published his masterpiece around the same time, by the way, just two years earlier. The story of Leopold Bloom wandering through the city of Dublin. The outcast. The cuckold. The Jew. Betrayed by his wife, who sleeps with another man while he spends the day out walking the streets. Bloom has become displaced. His country is imaginary. He returns late at night when she is already asleep. He picks up her underwear, and maybe then, holding these fantasy garments up to his face, he realizes that this is as close as he will ever get to home.
I’m not a literary scientist, Yanis said, but I believe James Joyce and Joseph Roth both struck the same model found in ancient Greek literature to describe the stranger. The solitary traveller.
The unrecognized.
They stood up and began putting the furniture back in place.
Leave it, Julia said.
But they all felt the need to bring things back to the starting point. They continued tidying up, covering the remaining food, bringing used plates out to the small kitchen. They folded the tablecloths and stacked the tables away. Small conversations broke out around the room as they carried the chairs over to where they normally were, in a cluster around the coffee table by the reception area. The book club journal was left on the desk for everyone to put in their own rating.
Jürgen began leafing through my pages and came to the map at the back. Lena explained to him how it had been drawn in by the original owner of the book, a place somewhere in the East, close to the Polish border, she believed.
He told Lena that he and his wife, Zeta, had been out there recently looking for a house to buy. Call it nostalgia, he said, something in that landscape I can’t let go. Somewhere to escape to. Zeta says we would have a rule – no phones, no devices, we would just walk and make meals and talk and be alive.
Sounds good to me, Lena said.
We found a nice house in the heart of a nature reserve, Jürgen said. It was funny, the estate agent insisted on showing us the basement. It was damp. We got the smell of mildew. There was nothing to see apart from a couple of shelves with pickle jars. The estate agent kept pointing out how much space there was. During the war, there were twenty-three people sheltered down there. They all survived in the end. They even went without being detected when the Russians arrived. It was the safest place in the whole of Germany.
The agent spoke about the basement as a unique selling point. The basement is where you will take shelter from whatever the world will throw at you. You never know what’s coming down the line, the agent said. Disease, hunger, migrants, the climate. You will be safe, she said. You will never run out of water. Space to store food. Look at the metal doors, you would have no trouble with marauders. Away from the floods. And the summers, the heat, the estate agent said, the world will be burning up and you will all be nice and cool down here.
Are you going to buy it? Lena asked.
We have bought it.
42
Look at her in good times – Friederike Roth. Walking along the street in Berlin, smiling to herself, wearing a fur-lined coat with a brooch in the collar. The coat is softly chequered, long and straight, double-breasted, with four big buttons. One of those cloche hats down over her forehead, shielding her eyes. Dark gloves and pointed shoes, a sheen in her stockings. She is twenty-seven years of age, married to a writer whose career is on the way up. She is carrying his manuscript under her arm. He’s walking by her side, a fraction ahead, his overcoat open, hands in his pockets along with a folded newspaper. He’s wearing a suit, also double-breasted, white shirt and bow tie. His eyes full of invention, his smile defiant, transferring a word from one side of his mouth to the other. They are walking in unison, right feet lifting off the ground.
I would
never have imagined, he writes, that I could love a small girl so permanently. I love her shyness and her sensibility, and her heart which is full of fear and affection, always afraid of what it loves.
That was in 1927, before the Nazis took over. When the world was in the sun for a moment. Before she became mentally ill and was transferred to an institution in Vienna to be closer to her family.
To her parents, he writes – if I can get enough money, I’m sure Friedl will get well without an asylum.
If it’s not too much trouble, why not give her a canary to keep in her room. It might distract her.
To his friend Stefan Zweig – I need 1,200 for my wife and 800 for myself monthly.
My wife’s costs are fixed, I can do nothing to reduce them. I will work to my very limits, even if it kills me.
My wife is so important, if I am to stay alive.
To her mother – if Friedl pulls through, I will be much older than her. As soon as I feel thoroughly aged, she will snap out of it, I know she will.
People ask after her everywhere in Marseilles, in all the hotels and restaurants.
His life moves on.
To his cousin – I’ve fallen for a twenty-year-old girl. It’s impossible, a crime, to attach this girl to me, and to the awful tangle of my life.
For the first time since my wife’s illness, I feel alive.
To Stefan Zweig – life is more beautiful than literature. Literature is a swindle. Schwindel. In German, the word covers anything from dizziness to fraud, fake, cheat, con, vertigo, spinning, swirling.
My wife is silent, he writes. My in-laws talk of a cure and of a resumption of the marriage, reporting of her happiness every time they mention me to her.
About his short-lived affair with the twenty-year-old girlfriend, he writes – I couldn’t stand another woman suffering on my account.
To her mother – I have money for Friedl until August.
If Friedl were to get better, then I would get better too. It’s brutal, I can’t bear it.
To Stefan Zweig – my wife has been in a state that makes it impossible for me to go to Austria.
To her mother – I was very glad to see Friedl’s handwriting is unchanged.
To his cousin – she’s become more lucid of late, asks for me from time to time, and I don’t have the strength to go to Vienna. What would that do? And if my wife becomes completely lucid, do I then go back to her?
To Stefan Zweig – the only thing I’ve managed to keep up are the monthly payments for my wife’s hospital.
I must live like a dog until the twentieth of September.
To her mother – I’m thinking of you and your pain, and hope that Friedl’s return to health will comfort us all.
In the meantime, he has been living with a new woman. Andrea Manga Bell. Her father was Cuban, her mother from Hamburg. She has two children from an earlier marriage to a prince from Cameroon. She works in the editorial department of a music publishing house. He takes his role as provider seriously. He is good with the children, making up stories, telling them that he was born a crow and that his mother threw him out of the nest.
He becomes possessive. He forbids Manga Bell to dance. Will not allow her to wear swimsuits. Forbids her to visit the hairdresser, claiming that hair salons are brothels, the hairdresser should come to the house. He’s against her continuing to work as an editor and she feels he is trying to make her dependent on him.
Manga Bell writes this about him –
He was an ugly man, but he had a strong pull on women, and there were always women who fell in love with him and were after him. I never met another man with so much sexual appeal. He was slow as a snail, holding back, never a spontaneous movement that I noticed, he lurked, every expression thought out. But he was soft, like no other, and I was completely mad about him.
They drink a lot and fight a lot. He claims Andrea carries a gun in her bag. He gets a friend to accompany him to a reconciliation meeting with her to make sure she doesn’t pull the gun on him.
The relationship with Andrea Manga Bell comes to an acrimonious end.
He writes frequently about insanity. A group of insane people getting off a train. A mother going insane when she is told about losing her son in the war. A version of himself gone insane, locked in a padded cell with nothing but a stool bolted to the floor, a twitch at the corner of his mouth, still trying to smile, only the rest of his lips have forgotten how.
He describes a circular insanity taking hold of society. Nationalism is the new religion. He writes about Hitler and the madness let loose on the streets. He drinks more and more heavily and writes novels with increasing urgency to keep himself sane.
To Stefan Zweig – my parents-in-law are emigrating to Palestine. It was for the sake of those old people that I undertook so much for my wife, now the mother is leaving her daughter, and I alone will be the mother.
My wife is currently being put up free of charge at an institution in Baden. But the sanatorium is asking for 7,000 schillings.
Love, for me, goes through the conscience, the way it does for others through the stomach.
To his French translator, Blanche Gidon – I suddenly had to leave Amsterdam for Paris [his codeword for Vienna] on account of my wife. I’m having awful days here. I am very, very unhappy.
I have initiated divorce proceedings, which is very difficult.
My wife’s sanatorium has set the bailiffs on me.
He drops the idea of divorce.
In Ostend, in a small group of exiled writers, he enters a new relationship with the German novelist Irmgard Keun. She is not Jewish, but her books still fell victim to the book-burning for portraying liberated female characters. She took a case for damages against the Chamber of Culture led by Joseph Goebbels, who was personally in charge of selecting banned books, but the case was never heard. She was imprisoned and had to be bailed out for a substantial figure by her father. She fled to Holland and ended up joining that clustering of exiles in a season of celebrated doom before the Nazis took over Europe.
She says of Roth – my skin said yes at once.
Irmgard is young and attractive. Never has she loved anyone as much in her life. Never has she met anyone with such a strong sexual force. She loves his fight, his calamity, his wreckage, his rage at Hitler and everything that is a lie. She says he is a gifted hater. She says he is a child of all countries. They live together and drink together and write together. He is getting steadily worse, his teeth are falling out, his eyes are red. He doesn’t eat, his legs are thin, he has a belly like a cannonball. He is like an old man with the mind of a child, calling for his mother. Once again, he is consumed with jealousy. He becomes so possessive that he cannot even let her out of his sight, shouting her name through the corridors of the hotel.
By the time she leaves him, a year and a half later in a crossfire of drunken arguments, Irmgard Keun says the alcohol has robbed him of his manhood. It was a great friendship more than a great love, she says. In truth, he loved only Friedl.
Not a day went by that he didn’t speak of her.
The last time he lays eyes on Friedl is through the spyhole of her cell.
He’s back in Vienna undercover. Back on the tram out to the suburb of Pensing, up to the Steinhof sanatorium on the hill. A quick shot of cognac before he walks into this vast compound of sixty buildings with the white cathedral and its golden dome at the centre. Fifteen thousand patients housed in three- and four-storey houses they call pavilions, all separated by trees into different zones to avoid them running into each other. It’s like a city built for the insane. The new lunatic asylum, they call it, a city within a city. Thousands of windows duplicating themselves into paranoid repetition. Thousands of eyes waiting to be recognized. He needs directions to find her. He has defaulted on his payments and they are threatening to transfer her to a facility where she can be made to
work for her keep. He cannot get close to her. The locked door of the cell between them.
He calls her name.
She screams at him to go away.
She has fallen into a violent disposition. According to a memoir by Friderike Zweig, Stefan Zweig’s former wife, it became dangerous for Roth to be in the same room as her.
She hates me, he writes.
The slender woman who once walked by his side on the street in Berlin, wearing a coat with a fur collar and a cloche hat, now sits crouched on the floor, staring across the empty space in front of her. Her hair has been cropped. Her face is puffed out. She is continuously harming herself, pulling her legs back and warping the knee joints.
Attached to her file, there is a mugshot photo that makes her look like a criminal in custody – one image face-on, one from the side. She is wearing a striped institutional gown with large black buttons. Her eyes bear a menacing expression. Full of defiance and pain. Maybe the hint of a tormented smile emerging in her mouth. The image taken from the side shows her head resting against a metal frame into which a card with her name has been inserted – Roth, Frieda.
The streetlights long for morning, he writes in one of his novels, hoping to be put out.
Who could blame him for going back to his rocking horse days? Back to his childhood fantasies of the cavalry coming through his hometown. It was his way of grieving, his way of trying to dream Friedl back into his life, still hoping that her illness could be cured in some imaginary way by slowing down the march of history.
He believed in the illusion of restoring the monarchy. For him, it was the European dream. With all its diversity and open borders. Where Jews were once safe. Where the chestnut roasters and the horse traders moved freely from country to country, from season to season, across mountain ranges. Where the cities bulged with difference. Where the music followed trading routes from East to West, from the Mediterranean up to the Baltic. His political views began to take on fictional values, to the point where he was convinced that Hitler could be stopped from annexing Austria by bringing back the monarch. In his wildest drunken visions he planned to smuggle the exiled heir to the throne back to Austria inside a coffin. His delusional conceit. The emperor coming back from the dead, stepping out of the coffin into a doomed democracy that was about to be swept aside. A funeral in reverse. A watch ticking backwards.
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