And what about that day at the sanatorium in Vienna? The day Roth goes to visit and finds himself alone with his wife inside one of those vertical coffins. Nothing in that padded cell that might give her cause to self-harm. Nothing but the stool bolted to the floor and the cold Viennese light dripping in through the high window, not enough to spread into the corners.
He speaks to her. He says her name and tells her the news from the world outside. He has brought his stories from the streets of Paris, the cafés, the world is still free, people have been asking for her. There will be such a great welcome for her when she gets better.
She remains unresponsive. What is there for her to report but the same routine interrogation by the psychiatric team about her thoughts, her feelings, her dreams, her sexual fantasies. The same greasy smells of dinner lingering in the walls, voices coming and going, faces unrecognizable, echoes following her back to her room and the screaming at night from deep inside a vertical coffin next to hers. The same walks around the grounds of the hospital. The same avenue of trees and the brief slice of sky, the same windows replicating themselves each day in this house of doubt. In the corridor, the sound of keys always coming to the wrong door.
He has come with his smile to restore her. He has brought the smell of smoke in his suit and laughs as he tells her it was bought for him by his friend Stefan Zweig when he spilled wine on his trousers. He has brought the sound of trains and platform whistles, the click of tracks, the screech of wheels. His eyes are alive with affection. His moustache. His cravat. His calm voice. His jokes will cure what all those psychiatric assessments have failed to understand. His hands are the only viable intervention left, like his own delicate handwriting, touching her face to remove a dried smudge of tear dust from her cheek.
Come on, she says.
Her eyes speak to his. She has it back, that provocative smile in her mouth. She takes his hand and invites him to dance with her around this anonymous room. His other hand is holding on to one of her cold kidneys at the back while she is humming along to the music inside her head, laughing and using his nickname – Mu. The one she made up from his second name, Moses.
Come on, Mu, you haven’t danced with me in ages.
His shoes squeak on the rubber floor. Her bare feet are silent. Around and around the stool fixed to the centre of the dance floor they swing to a tempo that begins to gather speed, a Viennese waltz that converts this small institutional space into a grand ballroom with ornate ceilings and golden columns. Her madness has purpose now. She flings his name at the rubber walls with accelerated joy and rage. An absurd force in her laughter, like the needle of a compass inside her head pointing to something that needs to be repossessed right away before it’s gone again.
You always take your time, Mu.
Her need for human warmth is urgent. Her tormented desires are now free to express themselves. All those possibilities, all the novels not yet written by her body, come to life with such conviction in his company. She can feel the energy in his lungs. She can feel the cool buttons of his suit. She can feel the soft weight of his writing hand. She can feel the padded floor against her back as they lie down together with the light on the ceiling buzzing like a trapped wasp. She can hear the sound of keys and doors and people whispering in the corridor.
She smiles and turns her head calmly towards the stool bolted to the floor as if there is somebody sitting there watching them.
It’s my husband, she says to the invisible spectator. His name is Joseph Roth. He’s a good storyteller. He can make things up that I could never imagine.
On the squeaky floor of this cell intended to prevent suicide, they spend the night together. Locked inside a room from which he has come to rescue her. Their confinement becomes their escape. Their marriage, their identity, their memory, the forces of hatred turned against them, the restless places they have travelled to and found freedom, the entire story of their love has been shaped into this one short, terminal moment of luck and misfortune. Surrounded by harm in a space that allows no harm, they keep each other close. He kisses her forehead and she lays her head on his shoulder. With the walls smelling like the interior of a car tyre, they lie awake in a time void.
She can’t sleep. She sits up and speaks to the door as though there is a team of doctors and nurses standing in the room with their charts observing her. She tells them to write down in the file – the man who brought her here came to take her away. She tells them to bring her clothes first thing in the morning, she will walk out hand in hand with him into the street, they will get on a tram together, straight to the main train station.
We’re going back to Paris, isn’t that so?
In a letter written to his publisher, Hermann Kesten, in 1971, Joseph Roth is reported to have said that he made love to his wife inside a padded cell on the advice of psychiatric experts. It was a private matter between husband and wife, not entered into the medical records. What is recorded in the case notes on repeated occasions is this statement in her own words – the person who brought me in here should come and take me out again.