Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

Forgive me, forgive me for telling you about it. I do so only this one time, never again, never. I have said nothing for eleven years, and I will soon be silent for all eternity; just once I must cry out and say what a high price I paid for my child, the child who was all my bliss and now lies there with no breath left in his body. I had forgotten those hours long ago in his smile and voice, in my happiness, but now he is dead the torment revives, and I had to scream out from my heart just this one time. But I do not accuse you—only God, only God, who made that torment pointless. I do not blame you, I swear it, and never did I rise against you in anger. Even in the hour when I was writhing in labour, when my body burned with shame under the inquisitive eyes of the students, even in the second when the pain tore my soul apart, I never accused you before God. I never regretted those nights or my love for you, I always blessed the day you met me. And if I had to go through the hell of those hours again and knew in advance what was waiting for me I would do it again, my beloved, I would do it again a thousand times over!

Our child died yesterday—you never knew him. Never, even in a fleeting encounter by chance, did your eyes fall on him in passing. I kept myself hidden away from you for a long time once I had my son; my longing for you had become less painful, indeed I think I loved you less passionately, or at least I did not suffer from my love so much now that I had been given the child. I did not want to divide myself between you and him, so I gave myself not to you, a happy man living without me, but to the son who needed me, whom I must nourish, whom I could kiss and embrace. I seemed to be saved from my restless desire for you, saved from my fate by that other self of yours who was really mine—only occasionally, very occasionally, did my feelings humbly send my thoughts out to where you lived. I did just one thing: on your birthday I always sent you a bunch of white roses, exactly the same as the roses you gave me after our first night of love. Have you ever wondered in these ten or eleven years who sent them? Did you perhaps remember the woman to whom you once gave such roses? I don’t know, and I will never know your answer. Merely giving them to you out of the dark was enough for me, letting my memory of that moment flower again once a year.

You never knew our poor child—today I blame myself for keeping him from you, because you would have loved him. You never knew the poor boy, never saw him smile when he gently opened his eyelids and cast the clear, happy light of his clever, dark eyes—your eyes!—on me, on the whole world. Oh, he was so cheerful, such a dear; all the light-hearted nature of your being came out again in him in childish form, your quick, lively imagination was reborn. He could play with things for hours, entranced, just as you play with life, and then sit over his books, serious again, his eyebrows raised. He became more and more like you; the duality of gravity and playfulness that is so much your own was visibly beginning to develop in him, and the more like you he grew to be, the more I loved him. He studied hard at school, he could talk French like a little magpie, his exercise books were the neatest in the class, and he was so pretty too, so elegant in his black velvet suit or his white sailor jacket. Wherever he went he was the most elegant of all; when I took him to the Adriatic seaside resort of Grado, women stopped on the beach to stroke his long, fair hair; in Semmering, when he tobogganed downhill, everyone turned admiringly to look at him. He was so good-looking, so tender, so attractive; when he went to be a boarder at the Theresian Academy last year he wore his uniform and his little sword like an eighteenth-century pageboy—now he wears nothing but his nightshirt, poor boy, lying there with pale lips and folded hands.

You may perhaps be wondering how I could afford to bring the child up in such luxury, allowing him to live the cheerful, carefree life of the upper classes. Dearest, I speak to you out of the darkness; I am not ashamed, I will tell you, but do not alarm yourself, beloved—I sold myself. I was not exactly what they call a streetwalker, a common prostitute, but I sold myself. I had rich friends, rich lovers; first I went in search of them, then they sought me out, because I was—did you ever notice?—very beautiful. Everyone to whom I gave myself grew fond of me, they all thanked me and felt attached to me, they all loved me—except for you, except for you, my beloved!

Do you despise me now for telling you that I sold myself? No, I know you do not; you understand everything, and you will also understand that I did it only for you, for your other self, your child. Once, in that ward in the maternity hospital, I had touched the worst aspect of poverty, I knew that the poor of this world are always downtrodden, humiliated, victims, and I would not have your child, your bright, beautiful son growing up deep down in the scum of society, in the dark, mean streets, the polluted air of a room at the back of an apartment building. I did not want his tender mouth to know the language of the gutter, or his white body to wear the fusty, shabby garments of the poor—your child was to have everything, all the riches, all the ease on earth; he was to rise to be your equal, in your own sphere of life.

That, my beloved, was my only reason for selling myself. It was no sacrifice for me, since what people usually call honour and dishonour meant nothing to me; you did not love me, and you were the only one to whom my body truly belonged, so I felt indifferent to anything else that happened to it. The caresses of those men, even their most ardent passion did not touch me deeply at all, although I had to go very carefully with many of them, and my sympathy for their unrequited love often shook me when I remembered what my own fate had been. All of them were good to me, all of them indulged me, they all showed me respect. There was one in particular, an older man, a widower who was an imperial count, the same man who wore himself out going from door to door to get my fatherless child, your child, accepted into the Theresian Academy—he loved me as if I were his daughter. He asked me to marry him three or four times—I could be a countess today, mistress of an enchanting castle in the Tyrol, living a carefree life, because the child would have had a loving father who adored him, and I would have had a quiet, distinguished, kindly husband at my side—but I did not accept him, however often he urged me, and however much my refusals hurt him. Perhaps it was folly, for then I would be living somewhere safe and quiet now, and my beloved child with me, but—why should I not tell you?—I did not want to tie myself down, I wanted to be free for you at any time. In my inmost heart, the depths of my unconscious nature, my old childhood dream that one day you might yet summon me to you, if only for an hour, lived on. And for the possibility of that one hour I rejected all else, so that I would be free to answer your first call. What else had my whole life been since I grew past childhood but waiting, waiting to know your will?

And that hour really did come, but you do not know it. You have no inkling of it, beloved! Even then you did not recognize me—you never, never, never recognized me! I had met you a number of times, at the theatre, at concerts, in the Prater, in the street—every time my heart leapt up, but you looked past me; outwardly I was so different now, the shy child had become a woman, said to be beautiful, wearing expensive clothes, surrounded by admirers: how could you detect in me that shy girl in the dim light of your bedroom? Sometimes the man who was with me greeted you, you greeted him in return and looked at me, but your glance was that of a courteous stranger, appreciative but never recognizing me: strange, terribly strange. Once, I still remember, that failure to recognize me, although I was almost used to it, became a burning torment. I was sitting in a box at the Opera House with a lover and you were in the box next to ours. The lights dimmed during the overture, and I could no longer see your face, I only felt your breath as near to me as it had been that first night, and your hand, your fine and delicate hand lay on the velvet-upholstered partition between our boxes. And at last I was overcome by longing to bend down to that strange but beloved hand, the hand whose touch I had once felt holding me, and kiss it humbly. The music was rising tempestuously around me, my longing was more and more passionate, I had to exert all my self-control and force myself to sit there, so powerfully were my lips drawn to your beloved hand. After the first act I asked my lover to leave with me. I could not bear it any more, knowing that you were sitting beside me in the dark, so strange to me and yet so close.