Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

The last word of the song stopped short, as if cut off by a knife. And in some alarm I felt a void before me, a sense of silent hostility as if I had broken something. Only slowly did my eyes adjust to the room, which was almost empty: it contained a bar counter and a table, and the whole place was obviously just a means of access to other rooms behind it, whose real purpose was immediately made obvious by their opened doors, muted lamplight, and beds made up and ready. A girl sat at the table, leaning her elbows on it, her tired face made up, and behind her at the bar was the landlady, stout and dingy grey, with another girl who was not bad-looking. My greeting sounded harsh in the space, and a bored response came back with some delay. Finding that I had stepped into such a void, so tense and bleak a silence, I was ill at ease and would rather have left at once, but in my embarrassment I could think of no excuse, so I resigned myself to sitting down at the table in front of the bar. The girl, remembering her duties, asked what I would like to drink, and I recognised her as German at once from the harsh accent of her French. I ordered beer, she went out and came back again with the lethargic bearing that betrayed even more indifference than the empty look in her eyes, which glowed faintly under their lids like lights going out. Automatically, and in accordance with the custom of such places, she put a second glass down next to mine for herself. As she raised her glass she did not turn her blank gaze on me, so I was able to observe her. Her face was in fact still beautiful, with regular features, but inner weariness seemed to make it coarse, like a mask; everything about her drooped, her eyelids were heavy, her hair hung loose, her cheeks, badly made up and smudged, were already beginning to fall in, and broad lines ran down to her mouth. Her dress too was carelessly draped, her voice hoarse, roughened by smoke and beer. All things considered, I felt that this was an exhausted woman who went on living only out of habit and without feelings, so to speak. Self-consciously and with a sense of dread I asked a question. She replied with dull indifference, scarcely moving her lips, and without looking at me. I felt I was unwelcome. At the back of the room the landlady was yawning, and the other girl was sitting in a corner glancing in my direction, as if waiting for me to summon her. I would have liked to leave, but everything about me felt heavy, and I sat in that sated, smouldering air, swaying slightly as the sailors do, kept there by both distaste and curiosity, for this indifference was, in a way, intriguing.

Then I suddenly gave a start, alarmed by raucous laughter near me. At the same time the flame of the light wavered, and the draught told me that someone must have opened the door behind my back. “Oh, so here you are again, are you?” said the voice beside me shrilly, in German. “Slinking round the house again, you skinflint? Well, come along in, I won’t hurt you.”

I spun round, to look first at her as she uttered this greeting, in tones as piercing as if her body had suddenly caught fire, then at the door. Even before it was fully open I recognised the trembling figure and humble glance of the man who had been almost glued to the outside of the pane just now. Intimidated, he held his hat in his hand like a beggar, trembling at the sound of the raucous greeting and the laughter which suddenly seemed to shake her apathetic figure convulsively, and which was accompanied by the landlady’s rapid whispering from the bar counter at the back of the room.

“Sit down there with Françoise, then,” the woman beside me ordered the poor man as he came closer with a craven, shuffling step. “You can see I have a gentleman here.”

She said this to him in German. The landlady and the other girl laughed out loud, although they couldn’t understand her, but they seemed to know the new guest.

“Give him champagne, Françoise, the expensive brand, give him a bottle of it!” she called out, laughing, and turning to him again added with derision, “And if it’s too expensive for you then you can stay outside, you miserable miser. I suppose you’d like to stare at me for free—you want everything for free, don’t you?”

The tall figure seemed almost to collapse at the sound of this vicious laughter; he hunched his back as if his face were trying to creep away and hide like a dog, and his hand shook as he reached for the bottle and spilled some of the wine in pouring it. He was still trying to look up at her face, but he could not lift his gaze from the floor, where it wandered over the tiles. And only now, in the lamplight, did I clearly see that emaciated face, worn and pale, his hair damp and thin on his bony skull, his joints loose and looking as if they were broken, a pitiful creature without any strength, yet not devoid of malice. Everything about him was crooked, awry, cringing, and now, when he raised his eyes, though he immediately lowered them again in alarm, they had a gleam of ill will in them.

“Don’t trouble yourself about him!” the girl told me in French, roughly taking my arm as if to turn me round. “This is old business between the two of us, it’s nothing new.” And again, baring her teeth as if ready to bite, she called out to him, “Listen to me, you old lynx! You just hear what I say. I said I’d rather jump into the sea than go with you, didn’t I?”

Once again the landlady and the other girl laughed, loud and foolish laughter. It seemed to be a familiar joke to them, a daily jest. But I found it unpleasant to see that other girl, Françoise, suddenly press close to him with pretended affection, wheedling him with flattery from which he shrank, though he didn’t have the courage to shake her off, and I was alarmed when his wandering gaze, awkward, anxious, abject, rested on me. And I felt dread of the woman beside me, who had suddenly been roused from her apathy and was full of such burning malice that her hands trembled. I threw some money on the table and was going to leave, but she wouldn’t take it.

“If he annoys you I’ll throw him out, the bastard. He must do as he’s told. Come along, drink another glass with me!”

She pressed close to me with a wild, abrupt kind of tenderness which I knew at once was only pretended, to torment the other man. At every movement she quickly looked askance across the table, and it was dreadful to me to see how he began to wince whenever she paid me some little attention, as if he felt hot steel branding his flesh. Without paying any attention to her, I stared only at him, and shuddered to see something in the nature of anger, rage, envy and greed arising in him, yet he cringed again if she so much as turned her head. She now pressed very close to me, her body trembling with her vicious pleasure in this game, and I felt horror at her garishly painted face with its smell of cheap powder, at the fumes emanating from her slack flesh. I reached for a cigar to keep her away from my face, and while my eyes were searching the table for a match she ordered him, “Bring us a light!”

I was more horrified than he was at such an imposition, making him serve me, and quickly set about looking for a light myself. But he snapped to attention at her words as if at the crack of a whip, came over to us, reeling, with unsteady footsteps, and put his own lighter on the table quickly, as if he might burn up if he touched the tabletop. For a second I met his eyes: there was boundless shame in them, and crushing embitterment. That servile glance of his struck a chord in me as another man, a brother. I felt the force of his humiliation at the woman’s hands and was ashamed for him.

“Thank you very much,” I said in German—she started at that—“but you shouldn’t have troubled.” Then I offered him my hand. A hesitation, a long one, then I felt damp, bony fingers, and suddenly, convulsively, an abrupt pressure in thanks. For a second his eyes shone as they looked at mine, and then they were hidden again by those slack eyelids. In defiance of the woman, I was going to ask him to sit down with us, and I must already have begun to trace the gesture of invitation, for she quickly ordered him, “You sit down again and don’t disturb us here.”