Journey Into the Past Read Free Page A

nitty-gritty after paying a nodding tribute to their gêne , Zweig doesn’t give them this out. Like Joyce at the very end of “The Dead,” like Yourcenar’s father in “The First Evening,” and like Flaubert’s brilliant closing pages of Sentimental Education , Zweig is the master of ineffable states of being. Ludwig’s dear beloved will do anything he pleases, with both passion and reluctance, but he dares not ask, doesn’t know what or how to ask, can almost hear her old words that had once spelled consent and diffidence: “Not now! Not here!” Thwarted by their own silence, they decide to leave the hotel bedroom to “go for a little walk.”
    Nothing has changed between them. Time hasn’t changed them, either. But time, as though still heeding an ancient interdiction that couldn’t possibly apply to the lovers any longer, has stood still and both of them are frozen. Time has happened to them.
    When Ludwig had first entered her house on returning to Germany, he was instantly made aware of these bewildering temporal crosscurrents, a “double sentiment which kept confusing both the past and the present.” “I lived in this house,” he thought, “something of me lingers here, something of those years, the whole of me is not yet at home across the ocean, and I still do not live entirely in my own world.” He is literally dislodged from the present and thrown back into the past; but if he is able to understand how uncanny such a feeling must be, it’s because he also knows that he should not feel it at all, since another part of him now thrives in Mexico. This is not just about the confusion of sentiments, nor is it about desire or renunciation; it is about the confusion of what Eliot called “time’s covenant.”
    Something far more profound and disturbing but more elusive yet is occurring, and it begins to emerge as they walk out of their hotel and make their way through an empty road studded by trees and lampposts with a view of the curving river below. There they observe how their shadows seem to merge then drift apart then merge again as the two come in and out of the light from each lamppost, “parting again only to embrace once more,” two “soulless figures, shadowy bodies that were only the reflection of their own,” “wanting to come back to life but unable to do so now.”
    Ludwig is aware that some meaning is struggling to reveal itself, that this game of shadows, which draw closer and move apart, says more about what is happening, has happened, may never happen—he doesn’t know. We are indeed in a shadowland strewn with wild if onlys. We become ghosts before we die.
    And suddenly, Ludwig remembers Verlaine’s poem, “Colloque sentimental.” She had read it to him years ago, almost prophetically, because the words of Verlaine’s lovers, who are lovers no more and may never be again, could just as easily apply to Zweig’s penumbral, “disembodied” almost-lovers now. “Beloved and out of reach,” now as she had been years earlier, she had once read the poem to him because reading from a printed page prevented either from uttering words they were both craving but reluctant to speak—because reading the words in French in her dimly lit living room in Germany had given them the necessary distance to confide just about everything yet feign not to have grasped any of it. As they’re walking on the pavement now, he catches himself misquoting the very same verses back to her. In Verlaine’s poem, one of the lovers speaks nostalgically of the past, using the informal tu . The other, ever so terse and withdrawn, asks “why should I remember anything,” using the more formal and indifferent vous .
    On hearing the words of Verlaine, without saying a word she places the room key in his hand. She has forgotten nothing. But he does not speak. “‘What’s the matter, Ludwig? What are you thinking of?’ But he merely dismissed it, saying, ‘Nothing, nothing!’” He might as well be