In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  “The president of the Republic has left Madrid, as you probably know,” says Van Doren, observing Ignacio Abel to be certain of what he suspects, that Abel didn’t know.

  “Probably the government will leave too, if it hasn’t already done so, in secret. Your family is safe, far from Madrid? I seem to remember that the last time we saw each other you said you’d left them in the Sierra. If you’d like, perhaps we can arrange for them to join you here after a time. Other professors we’ve brought over from Europe, from Germany especially, are in a similar situation. And of course, what happened to your friend Professor Rossman?”

  When he hears the name, Stevens turns his head toward them for a moment, his face red.

  “Professor Karl Ludwig Rossman? He’s a friend of yours, Professor Abel?”

  “He was,” he says, in a voice so low Stevens doesn’t hear him over the noise of the engine, but Van Doren does and immediately is on the scent, excited by the possibility of finding out, uncovering something.

  “Did he die? Recently? I didn’t know he was ill.”

  “Here we admire him as much as Breuer or Mies van der Rohe.” Stevens nervously takes his eyes off the road, turning his head toward Ignacio Abel with a bird’s rapid twist. “Did you really work with him? How exciting. In Weimar, in Dessau? His writings from that time are incomparable. His analyses of objects, his drawings. Come to think of it, Professor Abel, with all due respect, in some of your projects one can see Rossman’s influence.”

  Van Doren pays no attention to Stevens; he looks at Ignacio Abel, his head slightly bent, raising a match, the cigarette between straight fingers.

  “He was killed? In Madrid?”

  Reluctantly Ignacio Abel understands that it would be useless to tell what happened; recently arrived at his destination, not settled yet in the provisional refuge where he’ll spend at least a few months, the precarious portion of the future covered by his visa, he feels the futility of trying to explain what he’s seen, what his awkward English vocabulary won’t convey, much less the articles published in newspapers, the photographs in which almost everything is remote and abstract. What can Stevens understand, with his young heart, quick to admire? How to explain to him or Van Doren the fear of dying that makes you wet your trousers or the nausea of seeing for the first time a corpse with bulging eyes and a swollen black tongue jutting out between its teeth? Having seen or not having seen is the difference: to leave and go on seeing; to squeeze your eyes shut and not have it matter; to go on seeing with closed eyes the face of a dead stranger that gradually is transformed into the face of Professor Rossman, so that it’s easier to identify him by the collar partially detached from his shirt or the insignia of his cavalry regiment in his lapel than by the blurred features, disfigured and subject to fantastic distortions. “It was probably a mistake,” he says. “They must have confused him with someone else.” Professor Rossman was in the morgue, reeking of formaldehyde and decomposing in the heat of early September, a piece of cardboard with a number hanging around his neck like a crude scapular; not on one of the marble tables overflowing with bodies, rigid arms and legs projecting like bare branches, but on the floor, in a back room where flies buzzed and ants swarmed. He sees him now, and the stench invoked by memory is more intense than the smell of autumnal soil and fallen leaves that comes in the window and combines with the sweetish smoke from Van Doren’s cigarette. What he sees with half-closed eyes is more real than this moment, this car trip through fields and woods; so close to Professor Stevens and Philip Van Doren in the confined space of the car, a frontier separates him from them, an invisible trench that words can’t remedy. Suddenly he feels he’s lived in unreality since the night he left Madrid. The world the others inhabit is for him an illusion; what he still sees, though he’s left, is what turns him into a foreigner—not the data printed in a passport issued by a republic that from one day to the next may cease to exist, not the photograph taken several months earlier of the man he no longer is. He sees what they’ll never be able to imagine: the gray faces of the dead in the empty lots and cleared sites of University City, beside the adobe walls of the Museum of Natural Sciences, on the sidewalk of Calle Príncipe de Vergara, next to the entrance to his apartment house, beneath the same grove of trees in the Botanical Garden where not long ago he’d met Judith Biely, in any ditch on the outskirts of Madrid; the dead as diverse and singular as the living, frozen in a final gesture like the one caught by the flash of a photograph and yet gradually stripped of their individuality, preserving only their generic condition, old or young, men or women, adults or children, fat or thin, office workers or bourgeois or simple unfortunates, wearing shoes or espadrilles, with the gaps of lost teeth or gold teeth pulled by the thieves who come out early to plunder the bodies, some of the dead still wearing their eyeglasses, their hands tied or their hands and arms open and dislocated like those of a doll, with a cigarette in the corner of their mouth, with a churro that some wit had put between their teeth, hair standing straight up or disheveled as if just out of bed or flattened with brilliantine; dead bodies in pajamas, dead bodies in undershirts, dead bodies in ties and hard collars, dead bodies with eyelids squeezed tight or eyes wide open, some with jaws distended as if laughing out loud, others with a kind of somnambulistic smile, dead bodies on their backs or with their faces pushed into the ground or leaning to one side with their legs bent, a single hole in the back of the neck or a thorax ripped open by bullets, dead bodies in a puddle of blood or felled neatly as if a bolt of lightning or a heart attack had killed them, dead bodies with their bellies as swollen as the cadavers of donkeys or mules, dead bodies alone or piled on top of one another, dead bodies irreproachably clean or with their trousers stained by piss or shit, vomit on their shirts, all alike in the opaque grayness of their skin; unknown dead bodies, photographed from the front and side, classified in the records of the Ministry of National Security, where a photographer and his assistant came every afternoon to attach to large sheets of smooth cardboard the recently developed photographs they’d been taking since dawn in the empty lots of Madrid. With scissors and a pot of glue the assistant cut out the photographs and attached them to the cardboard pages of albums, above a panel that had at the bottom blank spaces indicated by dotted lines that were never filled in: name, address, cause of death. Fearful people huddled over the albums, looking at photographs, turning pages, elbowing their way into a room that was too small and badly ventilated, filled with smoke, the floor littered with cigarette butts. After a while their eyes grew weary and the faces in the photographs began to look identical, such generic black-and-white portraits that it was difficult to identify anyone. There was whispering, the sound of footsteps, from time to time a scream.

  He was out the entire day and at ten that night still hadn’t learned anything regarding Professor Rossman’s whereabouts. Since his car had been confiscated and streetcars ran erratically, he walked all over Madrid under the summer sun or rode in the suffocating metro, looking for him. Señorita Rossman was waiting in front of his building, she’d appeared early, before eight o’clock. “You have to help me, Professor Abel. Some men took my father away yesterday afternoon, told me he’d return as soon as he answered some questions, but wouldn’t tell me where they were taking him. You know so many people in Madrid, surely you can find out what happened to my father. You know how he is—he says whatever’s on his mind. He’d go down to that café next to the pensión, tell everybody that war isn’t a fiesta and unless there’s more discipline and fewer speeches and parades the Fascists would take Madrid before the summer was over. You know him, heard him say the same things a thousand times. Those people had no idea what he was saying, all that talk about Marcus Aurelius and the barbarians, the foreign barbarians and the domestic barbarians. He argued with the landlady at the pensión, whose son is an Anarchist. Perhaps because of his accent someone decided he was a spy.” But she was afraid for herself too, afraid the men who’d come for her father would come back to take h
er away. She’d spent a sleepless night. It was hot, her father had unbuttoned his hard shirt collar and was dozing in a rocking chair by the balcony that faced Calle de la Luna, where there was a militia barracks or an Anarchist headquarters. They came for him, and the only thing he asked them was to let him button his collar and put on his jacket and tie, take off his slippers, put on high shoes. But they took him away with his shirt open and no jacket, in his old cloth slippers. He did have time to put on the glasses he’d placed on a small table beside the rocking chair before he fell asleep. They were three well-mannered men armed with pistols, behaving with the neutrality of the police. Nothing had alerted her or her father to the danger because they hadn’t heard the usual heavy steps on the staircase or violent pounding on the pensión door while ringing the bell. At first she didn’t understand what was happening. She remembered that her father had sat motionless in the rocking chair, blinking because of the light that flooded the room when one of the men opened the curtains to begin the search. The three men filled the reduced space where Señorita Rossman and her father had moved cautiously to take advantage of every inch: the two identical beds with iron frames, the sink with its oval mirror, the wardrobe, the small bookcase with the few volumes they’d been able to save after years of travel, the mantel where they took turns writing letters and filling out forms, and where Señorita Rossman prepared her German lessons. Within minutes the beds were unmade, the mattresses overturned, the books strewn across the floor, along with valuable documents, forms, Professor Rossman’s diplomas, the contents of his bottomless briefcase, the clothing they kept in the wardrobe. Señorita Rossman sat in a chair, her bony knees and large feet close together, her elbows on her thighs, her skinny face resting on both hands, shaking just as she had a few times in her room in the Hotel Lux in Moscow, when no one would visit her and her father and they didn’t know whether they’d be allowed to leave the USSR. When they took him away, he said something to her in German, and one of them put a pistol to his side. “Be careful about passing messages we can’t understand.”

  “He told me to come and see you, that you’d help us, just as you’ve always helped us. I don’t know anyone else.” Señorita Rossman fixed her colorless eyes on Ignacio Abel from behind her glasses, which she wiped with a handkerchief that she returned each time to her sleeve with a kind of obstinate, automatic correctness. There was in her something resistant to attractiveness, a kind of helplessness doomed to awaken discomfort, not sympathy. He asked her to come in. She sat on one of the chairs, covered for the summer, in the dining room he rarely entered and where the disorder wasn’t so apparent. She had to catch her breath after having climbed five flights of stairs. Ignacio Abel brought her a glass of water, and she placed it carefully on the edge of the table, avoiding his inquisitive glance when their eyes met. Overwhelmed not only by her father’s arrest but by remorse at having dragged him to the Soviet Union when they had to leave Germany, she was ultimately responsible for Professor Rossman’s being denied what he most desired, a visa for the United States, where he might have continued his career like so many other colleagues from the Bauhaus, expatriates like him who were welcomed into universities and architects’ studios while he wandered Madrid, where his reputation was nonexistent and his credentials were worth nothing, selling fountain pens on commission in cafés, sitting in the waiting rooms of offices that never opened for him, devising new plans that would lead nowhere: a trip to Lisbon, where he’d been told that visas for America were less difficult to obtain, or where he and his daughter could board a ship that would carry them to an intermediate South American port, to Rio de Janeiro, Santo Domingo, or Havana, where someone would be careless or corrupt enough not to see the stamps with the hammer and sickle in his stateless person’s passport, almost as useless as the expired German passport that had red letters across the page with the photograph: Juden–Juif.

  He’d seen Professor Rossman from a distance on Calle Bravo Murillo, and as on many other occasions he’d been tempted to cross to the other side of the street or pass by without attracting his attention. Professor Rossman probably wouldn’t see him anyway, so myopic, so distracted in the crowd on the sidewalk in front of the Cine Europa, beneath large red-and-black flags and posters with bright colors and enormous figures in heroic poses, though they no longer displayed only advertisements for films but also battalions of muscular militiamen, workers carrying hammers and rifles, peasants shaking sickles against a red sky where squadrons of airplanes were flying. THE LIBERTARIAN REVOLUTION WILL CRUSH THE HYDRA OF FASCISM! AIR-COOLED, HIT PREMIERES. VISIT OUR SELECT REFRESHMENT COUNTER. Militiamen with rifles on their shoulders, tanned by the Sierra sun, drank steins of beer in the shade of a café’s striped awning. They talked in noisy groups, some in blue coveralls open to the waist, in odd tunics and trousers of uniforms, in military caps pushed to the back of their heads, almost all of them young, dark-skinned, with long sideburns and kerchiefs around their necks, emboldened when a girl passed near them, intoxicated by the feeling of omnipotence granted them by the collapse of the old order, their possession of weapons, the war, carnival and slaughterhouse all in one. For more than four hours the Popular Front Youth marched through Madrid in an impressive demonstration, cheered enthusiastically by an immense crowd. The war seemed to be simply this rough, nervous joviality, the general untidiness and indolent air of people on a hot August morning, the epic character of those gigantic figures outlined on placards covering the theater’s façade, which no one seemed to notice. On the sharp peaks of the Sierra de Córdoba our troops are preparing their assault on the City of the Mosque, waiting impatiently for the order to advance. The war was triumphalist lying newspaper headlines, funerals with fists in the air, somber marches in which death was always something abstract and glorious, parades with large banners and no one keeping time, preceded, as in the now abolished religious processions, by costumed crowds of children marching with wooden shotguns. The unstoppable advance of our troops continues over the rugged terrain of the Sierra de Guadarrama, where day after day enemy forces are being pushed from their positions.

  “My friend, my dear Professor Abel, how happy I am to see you.” Professor Rossman, his black briefcase pressed to his chest, wiped his hand on the skirt of his jacket before shaking Abel’s; he seemed to be in a great hurry and at the same time not to know where he was going, jumping from one topic to another. “Have you read today’s papers? The enemy is retreating on all fronts, but the lines defended by our glorious militias are closer and closer to Madrid. Believe me, I know, I spent four years studying maps of positions on the western front. Have you noticed that the reports deal not with what’s already happened but what’s about to happen? Granada on the point of surrendering to loyal troops, the fall of the Alcázar de Toledo is expected at any moment, the imminent capture of Oviedo or Córdoba is announced. And what about Zaragoza? How many weeks is it that troops have been advancing and putting the enemy to flight or meeting no resistance, and yet they never reach the city? I spend the day looking at the map and the Spanish-German dictionary. I have to look up Spanish words I thought I already knew. Are you well, still working? Your wife and children? You’re not accustomed to living alone, you look thinner. Would you like a drink, a stein of beer? The revolution is now a reality, yet the cafés are still open. It was the same in Berlin when the war was over. This time it’s on me. We have to celebrate my daughter’s excellent new job . . .”

  They looked for a table inside a café. As he sat down, Professor Rossman opened his briefcase and began to take out sections of newspapers and clippings, maps of the kind published every day, with modifications in rebel-occupied territory that according to all the reports kept shrinking, though some rebel positions were close to Madrid. The overwhelming advance of Republican troops along the Aragón front is seen as an imminent threat to the rebels of Zaragoza. Loyal forces are six kilometers from Teruel and continue to hold advantageous positions. Regiments under the command of the heroic Captain Bay
o continue their advance toward the reconquest of Mallorca. The rebels of Huesca are in a desperate situation.

  Ignacio Abel looked around uncomfortably, afraid someone would overhear what Professor Rossman was saying, be suspicious of his foreign air and war maps.

  “Be more careful, Professor,” he said in a quiet voice. “People are denounced on the slightest suspicion.”