The Last Days by Laurent Seksik

reception had been far from welcoming. They had reproached him for his lifelessness and his flippant flights of fancy, only then to seek his support. That travelling circus seemed so shallow and far-removed today.
    On some nights he had dined with Feder at the Café Élégant, a restaurant whose tables were arranged at the bottom of Rua Dias. It was a tiny greasy spoon with a frontage that was only a few feet wide, but they offered a variety of dishes besides black beans on their menu and their coffee was better than any he’d had in Vienna. Seated on that terrace in front of a friend who spoke his language, Stefan felt as though he’d stepped back in time.
    He was very fond of Feder. He had missed his sense of humour, as well as his cool, detached way of looking at world events. He had the ability to make light of one’s worst fears. He was quintessentially German in that way and every inch a Jew. “I remain a natural optimist,” he would dare to say. “Considering the recent turn of events, the Reich is definitely not going to be around for a thousand years. I give them five hundred years at the most… Come on, I guarantee you that just as fervently as I once expressed it to Walter Benjamin: we have no reason to despair!” By what accident of history had the Austrian writer and the journalist from Berlin found themselves in the middle of that valley surrounded by the jungle? They talked about the past. They talked about literature. They evaluated the comparative merits of Heine and Schiller, chatted about Goethe and Nietzsche. They tallied the books they’d been able to take into exile with them. They argued over the “Young Vienna” school. They mused about whether writers like Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Wassermann and Hesse were still worth reading. Yet they never broached the subject of which of these would be remembered by posterity. They never talked about the future. There was no future in this place. Even the present seemed a little unreal. There they were, just the two of them, like a decade earlier, except that creepers had entwined themselves around the café’s sign. The cries of monkeys emerged from the nearby jungle. No, it wasn’t Vienna. They were neither at the Café Central nor at the Café Museum. Petrópolis looked like a ghost city and they were the ghosts. It would have come as no surprise to Stefan had the trees and the mountains started to move and darkness engulfed the earth and the sky.
    When their talk shifted to current events, the conversation quickly ran out of steam. They became as silent as though they’d been watching a funeral procession march by. After which theyasked the café owner to bring them a chessboard. They began to play. Stefan was a mediocre player, even though he had recently picked up a little book that summarized the games played by the greatest grandmasters, a book he’d brought with him from New York without really knowing why. He had begun reading it on the boat that had brought them to Brazil and a new idea had come to him. He didn’t know what he would do with this story once he’d finished writing it. The plot had taken shape, at first in his head, then the words had come to him, almost effortlessly. He had never been prey to writer’s block. He would have certainly preferred to be better acquainted with the agonies of writing. He wrote like he thought. He sketched out the characters quickly, adventures would pop up in his mind and the plots, which were all alike, would begin to take shape. He would have loved to plumb the depths of souls a little longer and a little deeper, but after a few weeks he had always come to the conclusion that he’d exhausted all of his material. In the end, they were all invariably similar to one another: short stories about single-minded passions, irrepressible loves and macabre consequences. Everything was irremediably greedy and exuberant—in other words, the complete opposite of his own character. His work lit a