Free The Last Days by Laurent Seksik Page B

guava juice, sucked on a
jabuticaba
and savoured an
açaí
berry—which according to Rosaria was said to contain the elixir of youth.
    Yet he couldn’t stop himself from listening to the news. Japan was preparing to declare war on America. Admiral Dönitz’s U-boats had unleashed a reign of terror on the oceans. German troops were advancing on the Soviet Union in the
Drang nach Osten,
or the push towards the east, the same policy that Ludendorff had employed in 1918, but which was now being implemented far more efficiently. Lithuania, Ukraine and the Crimea had fallen,Kiev, Minsk, Leningrad and Riga had fallen—how could he not ponder the fates of those millions of Jews in their ghettos who were at the mercy of those Nazi soldiers? Goering’s tanks were at the gates of Moscow and Operation Barbarossa had been an unqualified success. The Nazis were looting the world of its gold and leaving ashes and cinders in their wake.
    The Germans had redefined the concept of evil. There were stories of soldiers going after children. As the Reich’s armies advanced, they left small detachments of the SS behind, whose sole aim was to eliminate all Jews from conquered lands. The troops liquidated the ghettos. Soldiers fired their bullets into the skulls of mothers and their children, as well as all men, young and old alike. How far would they go? In the beginning, he had doubted these accounts. Besides, those reports sounded so similar he’d begun to question their veracity. Maybe he was the one who was losing his mind, having removed himself from the world. Horror had become the overriding truth of these times.
    The following thought had impressed itself upon him: that news of barbarism’s sweeping victories no longer affected him like it used to. He was able to redirect his gaze away from headlines bearing tales of catastrophes. Had he grown jaded? Was the warm breeze making his head spin? Did the
cachaça
that Rosaria served him—which she assured him had nothing but sugar cane in it—contain an evil potion? He liked to think that those little bitter-tasting red berries, which he relished despite not knowing what they were, had cast some sort of spell on him; or that the cult to which Rosaria belonged, in which she made offerings to idols and prayed to them, had produced its desired results. He thought about Exu, one of the earth deities Rosaria worshipped. Exu was a demigod whom he dreamt of imitating, a being who had neitherfriends nor enemies and who saw beyond good and evil—even though some people considered him the Devil incarnate.
    A line by Heinrich Heine, the great Heine, whose books were also being burnt, kept coming back to him:
    When I think of Germany at night,
    It puts all thought of sleep to flight.
    He didn’t want to think about Germany. He hoped he might one day enjoy a full night’s sleep.
    The political situation in Rio was improving. Needless to say, the regime remained a kind of dictatorship, since Vargas had more in common with Franco than with Roosevelt. His Estado Novo had banned all political parties and thrown communists into prison. Still, even though the president, a follower of Machiavelli, had once made friendly overtures to the Reich, he was now realigning himself with the United States. Brazil’s economic interests lay north, not east. The South allied to the North. All of America, the largest of the continents, was going to war with the Nazified Old World. No, the future didn’t look too bleak.
    He dared to hope again. A small miracle had occurred during the previous week. He had gone down into the cellar and had found a wooden case full of books amidst the jumble of furniture and linens. In it, there were three schoolbooks, two mathematics textbooks, a French dictionary and a number of Portuguese volumes. When he came across
The Kreutzer
Sonata
and
Anna Karenina
, he saw himself back in 1928, in a thick wood alongside Tolstoy’s daughter as they walked towards the genius’s grave.
    Then