BOOKS
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The one thing that separates
Departures
from
Three Journeys,
however, is the introduction of death, and it makes its entrance, not
surprisingly, through the province of sex. Zweig reads in the paper
about the death of his friend David; then he is told that a friend of his
mistress Claire is also dying. Death suddenly seems to be "working
overtime" in his life, and his anxiety leads to impotence.
He receives a letter from David's widow, Anna, that renders
him even more helpless. She describes her husband's death as "both
terrible and joyous. During the last weeks we had a nonstop party,
and there was sex everywhere. It was unbelievably desperate and
swell. People fucked in every room. David lay in bed, with me on
one side and another woman on the other. We did things to him,
and he laughed. He never got out of bed; his bed was the center of
the party. It was uncanny, there was so much love."
But Zweig's penis is now "dead," "the appendage of an anxiety,"
he writes, "that .. . was seeping and expanding . Maybe sex and
death could be full of love: but with me it had been different. I had
been defeated by them. I could not even mourn properly for my
friend."
Part One of
Departures
ends with Zweig leaving Paris - his
home for ten years and, as he says, the scene of the only life he had
ever known - and heading for America. But even the descriptions of
his childhood that fill the early pages of the next essay are dense with
metaphors of death.
"I was brought up as a child of silence," Part Two begins.
"Silence about the Holocaust, and then, during the Cold War,
silence about politics.... They [Zweig's parents and neighbors
1
had spent forty years forgetting the past. But now it wasn't merely
forgotten, it was plowed under, erased; written not in words, but in
thick oily smoke on an unblinking sky. But they never talked about
the Holocaust. In my house, it was present as a silent bewilderment
and a struggle to be cheerful. I remember it, I suppose, as a lack of
light in the various apartments we lived in, or as a sagging in my
grandmother's face. To be a Jew, when I was a boy, was to be
unhappy, unspeaking; it was to live with an invisible limit."
Zweig tried to deny that there were limits. In
Departures,
he
notes that at first all he wanted from life was "a limited existence: an
enchanted ordinariness as an engineer, living in a tract house in
Queens, or as an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn, living in a
tenement, with a shopping street downstairs and the smell of food in
the hallway. But then would come the dark shove, the loose wire in
