Journey Into the Past Read Free

alone. But nothing else has changed. The house is the same, the help is the same, even her telephone number is the same; to his surprise, Ludwig is completely able to resurrect his age-old feelings of inadequacy as a young man when he had first stepped into that house. He thought he’d outgrown the feeling, what with being a married father and a wealthy businessman in his own right now; but if parts of us move on and grow older, others stay frozen still and don’t budge, won’t grow, won’t live, won’t die. We exist on several parallel time lines; sometimes those lines cross, sometimes they don’t touch, and sometimes each withdraws as though shoved by a “ghostly mist.” Nothing has changed—nothing—and yet things couldn’t be more strained between the lovers. “People may grow old,” she finally says in a moment of candor, “but they remain the same.” “Everything is as it used to be,” he will almost concur during an uncomfortable moment between them, only to add, “except for us, except for us!” But an instant afterward, as if to dispel his cruel quip, he will ask: “Do you still remember?” And she will right away reply: “I have not forgotten either.” For all their undiminished love, however, everything seems to have chilled between them. He asks to revisit his old room in the house. She shows him upstairs. This is where they had kissed and hugged and where she promised to offer herself. Now complete discomfort sits between them. With nothing more to add, they say goodbye. The next day, however, he asks to see her for one last time. “People come back,” says the author-Lothario in Letter from an Unknown Woman. “Yes, they do come back, but they’ve forgotten,” replies the woman who has loved him and only him.
    Unable to dispel the strain between them, together they decide to take a train to revisit Heidelberg as they had once done years earlier. It is a desultory trip down memory lane; both know it will be their last. It’s the evening. They are tense and uneasy with themselves, with each other, while something forever “unrelieved and unresolved” hovers between them. After nine years apart, rather than longing for the arrival at Heidelberg, they keep hoping the journey might never end:
    He felt a kind of bridal expectation, sweet and sensuous yet vaguely mingled with anticipatory fear and its own fulfilment, with the mysterious shiver felt when something endlessly desired suddenly comes physically close to the astonished heart ... Oh, to stay like this for hours longer, for an eternity, in this continuous twilight ...
    She feels no different. “A pity it’s over,” she says referring to the train ride, “it was so pleasant, just riding along like that. I could have gone on for hours and hours.”
    If their stifling discomfort has not unraveled any hope, the scene on the streets that evening nips all signs of lingering romance: Nazi youths, bearing swastikas, “chins defiantly jutting” and “marching with athletic firmness, carrying ... the banners of the Reich waving in the wind,” “four abreast ... goose-stepping along, feet thudding heavily on the ground.” Suddenly, everything is stamped with disquieting signals of the unavoidable war to come. The lovers, who have finally survived one war, are only too prescient of the next. Time is running out—on Europe, on them. There won’t be second chances.
    Unable to stand the “jubilant hurrahs from the huge mob,” they check into a hotel, which he claims someone had recommended. The stultifying, quasi-seedy bedroom bears “the unseen trace of other guests,” while its “unmade double bed bore visible witness to the point and purpose of this room.” The lovers feel hampered, awkward, nervous, embarrassed, self-conscious—these kinds of words suddenly teem upon the pages and reflect Zweig’s stunning psychological acuity. Where other writers would have glossed over the lovers’ inhibition and gotten down to the