The Last Days by Laurent Seksik Page A

succession of conflagrations in the hearts of his heroes, who would throw themselves head first into the flames while he burned on the inside. Indeed, when it came to the subjects of his stories, it was always the same old tune. The characters would attempt to resist their passions and once they relented and gave in to them, their guilty consciences prompted them either to turn their backs on life or to lapse into madness. As far as he was concerned, his work was governed by an overly simplistic mechanism: the fires of passion and the flames of hell. He reproached himself for never having scratched past the emotional surface of things, of never having struck the right tone,yes, that’s right, that was the reason he’d never been able to write anything but short stories. He’d never had the courage to plumb the depths of his characters. He had never accomplished the feat of narrating an entire life. He’d never written a masterpiece, a voluminous, heavy novel, something both dense and pacey, like
Berlin Alexanderplatz
and
The Magic Mountain
… Klaus Mann and Ernst Weiss had been right to mock him. He was nothing but a minor writer, a dilettante, a mundane chronicler, an inveterate bourgeois who hadn’t suffered for his art. As for his current heroes, the chess players, he still had no idea of what would happen to them, but Dr B. would undoubtedly discover the destinies of all the other characters would lead to either death or suicide.
     
    One evening, Feder had confided in him: “Well, I’ve lost my house, my country, my newspaper and I don’t know whether most of my family has managed to find a safe haven, but I’ve got a good reason to be satisfied with my condition: imagine the book I’ll be able to write once all this is over. I picture it as a sort of
Robinson Crusoe
, but one that speaks to the German-Jewish experience and is told through the eyes of Friday. Yes, I’ll be Friday, and since the fate of Jews everywhere is hanging in the balance, I’ll call myself Saturday, yes, Sabbath will be my pseudonym, an illustrious, holy name. I will be Sabbath and I will live on an island alongside the great Crusozweig. My book will tell the story of this Crusozweig, alone in the middle of the jungle. Put your mind at ease, I’m not taking any notes. I’ve inscribed everything on my memory. I can see the title on the jacket cover:
Five Years with Stefan Zweig
—yes, I share your natural optimism, of course the war won’t be over until 1946 or 1947. I’ve already got the climax in mind, it will be a chapter called ‘The Day that Zweig Smiled’. But the chapter entitled ‘The Day Zweig Shed a Tear’ will also be good… We’llhit the lecture circuit. You’ll stand beside me and all you’ll have to do is nod your head. My book will cast the spotlight on you. I will reveal that you are in fact quite a jolly man, always up for a laugh, easy to get on with, that you see life through rose-tinted glasses and that you want nothing out of life other than to smoke a fine cigar. Yes, I, Ernst Feder, will be the biographer of the man who will become the first Jewish Nobel laureate as soon as the war is over! Fine, I forgot about Bergson, but was Bergson really a writer?…”
    Feder was being sarcastic of course. He was well acquainted with Stefan’s novels and his comments had always provided welcome encouragement. With a trusted reader like Feder, he felt himself becoming a writer again, in short, he finally felt like himself again. He rediscovered his identity. He was able to escape the punishment of exile.
    “What I really like about you,” Feder explained, “is your Freudian undertone. Exactly, Freudian. You’re not a storyteller. You use a narrator to give an account and this narrator interacts with an outsider, who in turns hears the narrator’s confession. You have taken the technique of the embedded narrative to unparalleled heights. You have invented the literary psychoanalytical novel. You are Freud’s