The Last Days by Laurent Seksik

from those demons coming out of Germany, as well as the ones haunting her soul. A psychiatrist is looking after her in a Geneva clinic.”
    “Good thing she’s in Switzerland, she’ll be all right. Blessed are the Swiss who take us in and dress our wounds. Do you know the doctor’s name?”
    “Yes, it’s Alfred Döblin, our dear Alfred, that great physician, that renowned writer, the one who looked after her in Berlin and referred her to Dr Bernstein, a disciple of Freud, and who looks after those of us who’ve lost their minds down here.”
    “If he’s a disciple of Freud, then she’s saved.”
    Then they had talked about their work.
    “One day,” Roth’s voice had said, “you’re going to read my latest novella, you’re going to like it, it’s written in your style, and I think I’m going to call it
Job
. What about you? Are you writing? We must write, we must write books that are flame-proof.”
    He had replied that he was in the middle of finishing his autobiography.
    “That’s good,” Roth had said approvingly, “tell your readers about what our world was once like, be a witness to your times, we must be witnesses. An autobiography, that’s good.”
    “You’re in the right place for that.”
    “You’ve always kept me in a special place in your heart. You’ve always been there for… I’m happy to go on my journey now that I know that my wife, my little lost one, is finally able to sleep in peace.”
    After that, dawn had arrived.
     
    Now that he’d woken up, he pondered Friederike Roth’s destiny. Married to Roth and a schizophrenic, she’d been hunted down by the Gestapo, who after looking for her in Berlin, had finally tracked her down in Munich, after someone blew the whistle on her. The exile community had related how the Gestapo had surprised her in a tiny deserted flat, huddled up, having lost all faculties of speech, in a room plunged in darkness. The SS had grabbed her by the wrists and, since she’d clung to herself tightly, emitting long frightened, demented cries, they had pistol-whipped her and dragged her broken body out while a faint breath of life still coursed through it. They had led her to a truck where they’d kept other madmen, some of whom were howling, while others were immured behind a wall of silence. The truck had driven into the middle of the woods, right up to a magnificent building on the outskirts of Linz, the psychiatric hospital of Linz, an establishment that had been renowned in the late 1920s. Mrs Roth had woken up in a room filled with dozens of other mentally ill patients. In the midst of terrified cries, they had come to collect her, as well as other tortured souls. They had led Mrs Roth into a bare roomand under the Nazi policy “Aktion T4”, which aimed to eliminate patients suffering with mental illnesses, they had administered an injection of strychnine. Friederike Roth had been murdered.
    Zweig rose and gave one last thought to his friend. At least he’d been spared all of this.
     
    They had purchased tickets for Rio. The train would leave Petrópolis at ten o’clock. They would reach Rio in time for lunch. They waited on the small station’s deserted platform. Stefan was wearing his beige suit, while Lotte wore a pale-blue cotton dress. He was carrying a bulky folder under his arm. He looked worriedly around him.
    “No one’s going to steal anything from you, you know,” she said mockingly.
    Her comment cheered him up for a few seconds, then he reverted to a sombre disposition. Two adolescents were crossing the platform just a few metres ahead of him. He took three steps back and clenched the folder tightly.
    “You’re not running any risks. Who’s going to steal a manuscript? People barely have enough to eat.”
    It was a joke, but she knew how important the manuscript was to him. She understood his fear of losing it. In a way, it was as if he were holding his life in his hands. The book spoke of a world that didn’t exist any more