The Last Days Read Online Free

together in ahouse far from the reach of men, all alone. Perhaps it had been their destiny all along to be forced onto the path of exile so that they might find one another, far from barbarians and their oaths, sheltered behind a mountain range and buffered by a vast ocean.
    He would have loved to believe in destiny, to think that this voyage had been guided by a higher will. Yet he had never believed in God. He felt as though he’d left the keys to his fate in the lock of his house in Salzburg.
    *
    On the morning of the second day, a beam of light cut through the bedroom blinds and curtains. He partly opened his eyelids. Whereas he had usually needed a few minutes before mustering his energies in the past, he got out of bed immediately. The housekeeper, a friendly young lady whom Mrs Banfield had put at their disposal, made him some coffee, and he drank it sitting on the veranda. Although he had stopped dreaming long ago, it was so bright outside that he seemed to have slipped into reverie.
    Lotte got up not long after him. When she came out onto the veranda, the sun cast a beam of light on her. She said she’d been woken up by the sound of birdsong: a primeval sort of choir, the likes of which she’d never heard before. “A tropical symphony,” she said, smiling. His thoughts drifted to his friend Toscanini when he’d conducted
Pastoral
in Monte Carlo in 1934. But he didn’t linger on these memories. He wanted to make a clean break with the past. Petrópolis had to clear all that dross and nostalgia from his mind.
    Lotte had slept well. Her face said it all. Up until that point, the miles they’d travelled had seriously compromised her health. Her condition had worsened in the past few months. The oceancrossing had hollowed her cheeks, damaged her eyesight and chapped her lips. Lotte’s heart hadn’t coped well with London weather. After they’d left Britain, Lotte’s lungs had rejected the New York air during their stopover in that city. That was part of the reason they’d headed farther south. The first time they’d gone to Brazil, a year earlier, the weather in Petrópolis’s hilly heights had proved restorative. It was as if they’d gone to the Austrian Alps, to Semmering, Baden or some other spa town.
    It had been a long time since her medication had had any effect on her asthma. Every night, around two o’clock in the morning, Stefan had been forced to look on, powerless, as his young wife gasped for air, hovering on the brink of asphyxiation, sitting on the window sill and looking as though she had wanted to breathe all the world’s air into her lungs. The continents they’d travelled through, the succession of hotel rooms and the endless uncertainties had accentuated her illness. Just as they had lacked for space throughout their exile, clean air had also been in short supply. Air had been a precious commodity for her. Now they had nowhere left to hide and their finances had run dry. They were even running out of oxygen.
     
    They decided to go out to lunch. Lotte was wearing the beige silk dress she’d purchased in New York the previous month, a few days before they’d boarded the ship for Brazil. They had been living at the Wyndham Hotel on 25th Street, a corner of tranquillity they’d grown very fond of. America had initially looked welcoming . A second life in the New World. They had landed in New York at the end of June 1940, while the Britain they’d left behind was collapsing under the brunt of the German bombing raids. They had enjoyed a few days of happiness, but they had once again had to apply for visas, filling in a great number of forms,asking for references, simply to prove they had the right to exist, even to be there, living in the midst of constant uncertainty and temporary solutions. America hadn’t really turned out to be the promised land everyone claimed it was. The more Lotte’s asthma worsened, the more their liveliness was sapped. She started having coughing fits. At