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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
"A perfect translation of a near-perfect novella of bourgeois adultery and guilt." - Jonathan Bate, Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year 2010 Finding her comfortable bourgeois existence as wife and mother predictable after eight years of marriage, Irene Wagner brings a little excitement into it by starting an affair with a rising young pianist. Her lover's former mistress begins blackmailing her, threatening to give her secret away to her husband. Irene is soon in the grip of agonizing fear.Written in the spring of 1913, and first published in 1920, this novella is one of Stefan Zweig's most powerful studies of a woman's mind and emotions. La Paura (1954) the Roberto Rossellini film based on the Stefan Zweig novel Fear was the last of the extraordinary features in which Rossellini directed Ingrid Bergman, his wife.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
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STEFAN ZWEIG
FEAR
TRANSLATED BY ANTHEA BELL
Contents
FEAR
Fear
AS IRENE came down the stairs from her lover’s apartment, again that pointless fear suddenly overwhelmed her. All at once there was a shape like a black spinning top circling before her eyes, her knees froze in dreadful rigidity, and she had to catch hold of the banister rail in haste to keep herself from falling abruptly forwards. It was not the first time she had taken the risk of visiting him here, and this sudden fit of terror was by no means new to her. However much she steeled herself against it, every time she set off for home she was always subject, for no reason at all, to such attacks of senseless, ridiculous fear. The way to her rendezvous was infinitely easier. Then she told the cab driver to stop at the corner of the street, swiftly and without looking up she walked the few steps to the front door of the building where he lived, and hurried upstairs. After all, she knew he was waiting for her in the apartment, he would be quick to open the door, and her initial alarm, which had been mingled with ardent impatience, dissolved in the heat of their embrace as they met. But then, when she left to go home, that mysterious shuddering fit came over her, vaguely mingled with a sense of guilt, and the stupid delusion that every stranger in the street could tell from her face where she had been, and might add to her confusion by giving her a bold smile. Even the last few minutes that she spent with her lover were poisoned by rising uneasiness as she anticipated that sensation, and when she prepared to leave her hands were trembling with nervous haste, her mind was distracted as she heard his parting words to her, and she was quick to fend off the last lingering signs of his passion. Everything in her was anxious to be gone, to get away from his apartment building, away from her adventure and back to her placid, bourgeois world. She scarcely dared to look in the mirror for fear of the distrust in her own eyes, yet it was necessary to check that no disorder in her clothing betrayed the passion of the hour they had just passed together. Then came his last words of reassurance, but in vain, for she hardly heard them in her agitation, and she spent the final moment listening behind the safety of his door to make sure no one was going either up or downstairs. Once she was outside the door, however, her fear was waiting, impatient to take her in its grasp, and so imperiously disturbing her heartbeat that she was already breathless as she went down the first few steps, feeling the strength she had nervously summoned up fail her.
She stood there for a moment with her eyes closed, avidly breathing in the cool air in the dimly lit stairwell. Then a door slammed on an upper floor of the building, and she pulled herself together in alarm and hurried on downstairs, while her hands instinctively drew the thick veil she was wearing even closer. And now she faced the threat of that last, most dreadful moment, the terror of stepping out of the door of a building where she did not live into the street, perhaps meeting some acquaintance who happened to be passing and who might ask what she was doing here, thus forcing her, confused as she was, into the dangerous necessity of telling a lie. She lowered her head, like an athlete about to take off for a great leap, and walked fast and with sudden determination towards the half-open front door.
There she collided with a woman who was obviously on her way in. “I’m so sorry,” she said, trying to get past quickly. But the woman barred her way, staring at her angrily and at the same time with unconcealed scorn.
“Oh, so I catch you here for once, do I?” she said in a coarse voice, not at all discomposed. “That’s right, oh yes, what they call a real lady, ever so respectable! Not satisfied with her husband and all his money and that, no, not her, she has to go stealing a poor girl’s fellow too!”
“For God’s sake … what do you … You’re mistaken …” stammered Irene, making a clumsy attempt to get past. But the sturdy figure of the woman stood four-square in the doorway, and she went on abusing Irene in penetrating tones.
“Not me, no, I ain’t mistaken, I know your sort! You been with my beau, my Eduard! Caught you at last, didn’t I? Now I know why he’s got so little time for me lately … all on account of you, you nasty, horrid …”
“For God’s sake!” Irene interrupted her in a fading voice. “Don’t shout so loud!” And she instinctively retreated into the front hall of the building. The woman looked at her with derision. She somehow seemed to be enjoying Irene’s fear and trembling, her obvious helplessness, for she now examined her victim with a confident smile of scornful satisfaction. Her voice took on a louder and almost weighty tone of malicious relish.
“So that’s what them married ladies look like, them fine ladies as go stealing other girls’ fellows! Veiled, of course, ho yes, so they can carry on acting all respectable arterwards …”
“What … what do you want from me? I don’t know you at all … I have to go …”
“Yes, that’s right, go back to your fine husband, acting the lady, nice warm room to sit in, maid to undress you and all. It don’t bother your sort what the likes of us do. We could die of hunger for all you care, ain’t that a fact? The likes of you respectable ladies—you’d take every last thing we got!”
Pulling herself together and obeying a sudden if vague inspiration, Irene put her hand into her purse and took out whatever she found in the way of banknotes. “Here … here you are, take this, but now let me go. I’ll never come back here again … I swear it.”
With an unpleasant expression on her face, the woman took the money, muttering, “Bitch!” Irene flinched at the word, but she saw that the woman was standing aside to let her through the doorway, and she hurried out, a sombre, breathless figure running like a suicide about to jump off a tower. She saw faces like distorted masks passing her as she hurried on, making her way with difficulty, her vision clouded, towards a cab, a motor car standing at the street corner. She flung herself down on its upholstery, and then everything in her seemed to freeze rigid and motionless. When the driver finally, and in some surprise, asked his strangely-behaved fare where she wanted to go, she simply stared blankly at him for a moment until her confused mind finally succeeded in understanding what he meant. “Oh, to the railway station, the Südbahnhof,” she uttered hastily, and then, as it suddenly occurred to her that the woman might follow, she added, “Quick, quick, please drive fast!”
