Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

“It was a very valuable item that we sold, a Rembrandt etching. The dealer offered us many, many thousands of marks for it, and we hoped that would provide for us for years. But you know how money melts away these days… we had deposited most of it in the bank, but two months later it was all gone. So we had to sell another work, and then another, and the dealer was always so late sending the money that it was already devalued when it arrived. Then we tried auctions, but there too we were cheated, although the prices were in millions… by the time the millions reached us they were nothing but worthless paper. And so gradually the best of his collection left us, except for a few good items, just so that we could lead the most frugal of lives, and Father has no idea of it.

“That’s why my mother was so alarmed when you came today—because if he opens the portfolios and shows them to you, it will all come out… you see, we put reprints or similar sheets of paper in the old mounts instead of the prints we had sold, so that he wouldn’t notice when he touched them. If he can only touch them and enumerate them (he remembers their order of arrangement perfectly), he feels just the same joy as when he could see them in the past with his own eyes. There’s no one else in this town whom Father would think worthy of seeing his treasures… and he loves every single print so fanatically that I think his heart would break if he guessed that they all passed out of his hands long ago. You are the first he has invited to see them in all these years, since the death of the former head of the engravings department in the Dresden gallery—he meant to show his portfolios to him. So I beg you…”

And suddenly the ageing woman raised her hands, and tears gleamed in her eyes.

“…We beg you… don’t make him unhappy… don’t make us all unhappy… don’t destroy his last illusion, help us to make him believe that all the prints he will describe to you are still there… he wouldn’t survive it if he only suspected. Maybe we have done him an injustice, but we couldn’t help it. One must live, and human lives, the lives of four orphaned children as well as my sister, are surely worth more than sheets of printed paper. To this day, what we did hasn’t taken any of his pleasure from him; he is happy to be able to leaf through his portfolios for three hours every afternoon, talking to every print as if it were a human being. And today… today would perhaps be the happiest day of his life; he’s been waiting years for a chance to show a connoisseur his darlings. Please… I beg and pray you, please don’t destroy his happiness!”

My account of her plea cannot express the deep distress with which she told me all this. My God—as a dealer I have seen many such people despicably robbed, infamously deceived by the inflation, people who were persuaded to part with their most precious family heirlooms for the price of a sandwich—but here Fate added a touch of its own, one that particularly moved me. Of course I promised her to keep the secret and do my best.

So we went back to the apartment together—on the way, still full of my bitter feelings, I heard about the trifling amounts that these poor women, who knew nothing of the subject, had been paid, but that only confirmed me in my decision to help them as well as I could. We went up the stairs, and as soon as we opened the door we heard the old man’s cheerfully hearty voice from the living room. “Come in, come in!” With a blind man’s keen hearing, he must have heard our footsteps as we climbed the stairs.

“Herwarth hasn’t been able to sleep at all, he is so impatient to show you his treasures,” said the little old lady, smiling. A single glance at her daughter had already set her mind at rest: I would not give them away. Piles of portfolios were arranged on the table, waiting for us, and as soon as the blind man felt my hand he took my arm, without further greeting, and pressed me down into an armchair.

“There, now let’s begin at once—there’s a great deal to see, and I know you gentlemen from Berlin never have much time. The first portfolio is devoted to that great master Dürer and, as you’ll see for yourself, pretty well complete—each of my prints finer than the last. Well, you can judge for yourself, look at this one!” he said, opening the portfolio at the first sheet it contained. “There—the Great Horse!”

And now, with the tender caution one would employ in handling something fragile, his fingertips touching it very lightly to avoid wear and tear, he took out of the folio a mount framing a blank, yellowed sheet of paper, and held the worthless scrap out in front of him with enthusiasm. He looked at it for several minutes, without of course really seeing it, but in his outstretched hand he held the empty sheet up level with his eyes, his expression ecstatic, his whole face magically expressing the intent gesture of a man looking at a fine work. And as his dead pupils stared at it—was it a reflection from the paper, or a glow coming from within him?—a knowledgeable light came into his eyes, a brightness borrowed from what he thought he saw.

“There,” he said proudly, “did you ever see a finer print? Every detail stands out so sharp and clear—I’ve looked at it beside the Dresden copy, which was flat and lifeless by comparison. And as for its provenance! There—” and he turned the sheet over and pointed to certain places on the back, which was also blank, so that I instinctively looked at it as if the marks he imagined were really there after all—“there you see the stamp of the Nagler collection, here the stamps of Remy and Esdaile; I dare say the illustrious collectors who owned this print before me never guessed that it would end up in this little room some day.”

A cold shudder ran down my back as the old man, knowing nothing of what had happened, praised an entirely blank sheet of paper to the skies; and it was a strange sight to see him pointing his finger, knowing the right places to the millimetre, to where the invisible collectors’ stamps that existed only in his imagination would have been. My throat constricted with the horror of it, and I didn’t know what to say; but when, in my confusion, I looked at his wife and daughter I saw the old woman’s hands raised pleadingly to me again, as she trembled with emotion. At this I got a grip on myself and began to play my part.

“Extraordinary!” I finally stammered. “A wonderful print.” And at once his entire face glowed with pride. “But that’s nothing to all I still have to show you,” he said triumphantly. “You must see my copy of the Melancholia, or the Passion—there, this one is an illuminated copy, you won’t see such quality in one of those again. Look at this—and again his fingers tenderly moved over an imaginary picture—“that freshness, that warm, grainy tone. All the fine dealers in Berlin, and the doctors who run the museums there, they’d be bowled over.”

And so that headlong, eloquent recital of his triumphs went on for another good two hours. I can’t say how eerie it was to join him in looking at a hundred, maybe two hundred blank sheets of paper or poor reproductions, but in the memory of this man, who was tragically unaware of their absence, the prints were so incredibly real that he could describe and praise every one of them unerringly, in precise detail, just as he remembered the order of them: the invisible collection that in reality must now be dispersed to all four corners of the earth was still genuinely present to the blind man, so touchingly deceived, and his passion for what he saw was so overwhelming that even I almost began to believe in it.

Only once was the somnambulistic certainty of his enthusiasm as he viewed the collection interrupted, alarmingly, by the danger of waking to reality; in speaking of his copy of Rembrandt’s Antiope (the print of the etching was a proof and must indeed have been inestimably valuable), he had once again been praising the sharpness of the print, and as he did so his nervously clairvoyant fingers lovingly followed the line of it, but his ultra-sensitive nerves of touch failed to feel an indentation that he expected on the blank sheet. The suggestion of a shadow descended on his brow. His voice became confused. “But surely… surely this is the Antiope ?” he murmured, with some awkwardness, whereupon I immediately summoned up all my powers, quickly took the mounted sheet from his hands, and enthusiastically described the etching, which I myself knew well, in every detail. The tension in the blind man’s expression relaxed again. And the more I praised the merits of the collection, the more did a jovial warmth bloom in that gnarled old man’s face, a simple depth of feeling.