In the Night of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  “And you ought to take better care of yourself, my dear friend. You don’t look well, if you don’t mind my saying so. Do you have something to occupy your time? Is it true construction at University City is temporarily suspended? I hear the insurgents plan to attack Madrid on that flank, which makes sense, militarily speaking. Don’t look at me that way, don’t be afraid. Personally I’m not afraid. I’m an old man and a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. Those who expelled me from my country are the ones helping the rebels with armaments and airplanes. What interest can I have in being on their side? Where can I go if they enter Madrid? But as I was saying, there’s good news for us, for my daughter above all, excellent news.”

  “Did they finally give you visas for America?”

  “Who can think now about visas? We’ll have to wait for all this to be over in Spain. Not before the end of the summer, if you’ll permit my pessimism, no matter what the newspapers say. Will the British and French pressure Hitler and Mussolini not to aid Franco? I don’t think so. Your government wants to tell the world it’s facing a barbarian invasion on its own, but newspapers throughout Europe are filled with photographs of burned churches and murdered priests and monks. You say the other barbarians kill more? Probably, but that’s not held against them by Mussolini or Hitler. And how are you going to explain yourselves if no one in the government speaks foreign languages? I’m not complaining—thanks to that, my daughter’s finally found an excellent job now that the children to whom she gave German lessons are all away for the summer. And better paid. She’s been hired as a translator in the censorship service for foreign correspondents. She speaks English and Russian almost as well as German, as you know, and her Spanish is excellent, much better than mine will ever be. She works near the pensión, in an office in the Telephone Building, and has a safe-conduct and food coupons. I help her in whatever way I can, as you see. I look for newspaper articles for her, take her to the Telephone Building and pick her up. My poor child’s never known how to look after herself, not even when she became a fanatical Communist. She’d go to endless meetings, and her mother would fall asleep—she was already ill at the time and taking strong pain medicines—but I’d stay awake until she returned. My poor child, in love with Lenin and Stalin, just as she’d once been in love with Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go home to review today’s press with her before she goes to the office. My daughter thinks she’s a Communist, but basically she’s a romantic señorita from my grandparents’ generation. Instead of reading Heine, she took to reading Karl Marx. Do you know what I’m afraid of? That she’ll fall in love with one of those American correspondents who arrive each day in Madrid to see the war at first hand. My daughter’s destiny is to suffer for love. For love of a man who ignores her or uses her and deceives her with another woman, or for love of a cause that promises her a total explanation of the world and heaven on earth. The worst has been when the two loves were combined. Do you know why she wanted to go to Russia when we could no longer live in Germany? I followed her, alarmed at her living alone in that frightening country. She wanted to go to Russia to see for herself the homeland of the proletariat and to follow like a dog the leader of the German Communist Party, with whom she fell in love and who took her to bed on a whim even though he was married and had children. Revolutionary morality. They gave my daughter a job as a typist in an office of the Comintern, and from time to time the heroic comrade visited our room in the Hotel Lux and I had to go out for several hours. There are no cafés like this one in Moscow, my friend, no waiters in short white jackets who go on serving you as they did before the revolution. Suddenly the comrade stopped coming, and my daughter spent her nights crying. The new Soviet woman weeping like a señorita of the last century because her beloved no longer visits her as he once did. But the hero also stopped going to the office, where my daughter helped him body and soul in the propaganda struggle that would soon overthrow Hitler, casting an international spotlight on his crimes. He hadn’t gone off with another typist or secretary. He hadn’t gone back to his wife, about whom nothing was known. One day we learned he’d been arrested. They accused him of complicity with the assassins of Kirov in Leningrad. But he’d never gone to Leningrad and wasn’t even in the USSR when Kirov was killed! The other girls in the office stopped speaking to her, and after a few weeks they didn’t even look at her. Not at her and not at me. We were like two phantoms in the halls of the Hotel Lux. But we didn’t talk to each other when we were alone in our room either. She didn’t tell me, but I knew what she was thinking as she sat by the telephone. Her lover had done something worse than betray her—he’d betrayed the revolution or the party or the proletariat. Why would they accuse him if he wasn’t guilty? And what if he’d been arrested because of her, because of some indiscretion she’d committed without realizing it? My daughter always burdens herself with the guilt of the world. She still hopes he’ll appear, the misunderstanding will vanish, and his good name will be rehabilitated. Day after day no one spoke to us, but she wasn’t fired, and we weren’t thrown out of the hotel or arrested. But like most people in our situation, we kept a packed suitcase under the bed in the event the police came to take us in the middle of the night. Then one day they came for us. Not in the middle of the night but at eight o’clock in the evening, a short time after my daughter had come home from the office. We heard their footsteps on the stairs, then in the corridor, they knocked on the door, my daughter remained seated, trembling. I felt a certain relief, to tell you the truth. If it was going to happen, better for it to happen sooner rather than later. Young men, polite, in clean uniforms and shining boots, told us to accompany them, and as we walked along the hall I thought, how strange that they’ve come so early, that they are taking us through the hotel in sight of everyone, not after midnight. They had us climb into a black van—clearly we weren’t going to Lubyanka Prison, which wasn’t far from the hotel. The van stopped at the railroad station. They almost dragged us along the platform, pushed us into a car, and handed us an envelope with our passports. They could’ve killed us or sent us to Siberia, but they expelled us, I still don’t understand why, why they let us live . . .”

  Professor Rossman must have seen it all happening again, this time with the certainty that there was no way out: the footsteps on the stairs, the pounding on the door, his daughter shaking, the same suitcase that had been packed in Moscow ready under the bed. But it wasn’t his daughter who’d been chosen by misfortune, as he’d always feared. It was him. Sitting in a rocking chair in the heat of an August afternoon, Professor Rossman slowly realized that these methodical men who didn’t raise their voices and weren’t wearing the coveralls of militiamen or carrying rifles were probably going to kill him.

  “Of course you did everything you could to save him,” said Van Doren. “Perhaps you even put your own life in danger.”

  “Is Rossman dead?” Stevens looked at them in the rearview mirror, not quite following the conversation in Spanish. “In Madrid? I didn’t see anything in the paper.”

  “I didn’t have to risk anything. He was dead and I kept looking for him.”

  29

  HE WAS DEAD, and for several days early in September Ignacio Abel searched for him in vain, wandering from one end of Madrid to the other, looking suspicious in his light suit and tie and neatly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket among the men with unshaven faces in unbuttoned shirts and blue coveralls who filled the streets and café terraces, the young men who carried rifles over their shoulders and wore pistols and cartridge belts around their waists, demanding papers or ordering passersby to put up their hands. That morning he told Señorita Rossman to wait until he returned, and if he learned anything he’d telephone her; he showed her where the kitchen was in case she wanted something to eat, though there was little food left in the cupboard or refrigerator. Throughout the day he thought of her, imagining her in the same position in which he’d left her, sitting at the dining
room table in front of the glass of water, waiting for his return or a telephone call, crushed by a grief that when transmitted to him changed into guilt, a bottomless remorse for not having helped her and Professor Rossman as much as he should have, helped them with true conviction and not out of pity, perhaps turning in a timely way to influential friends. Señorita Rossman’s desperate overconfidence in coming to him for help led him to an unrealistic sense of resolve. He leafed through his pocket diary for names, addresses, and telephone numbers; with her present he made calls that weren’t answered (the telephone lines weren’t working or phones rang in empty houses or abandoned offices). With a decisive air he put on his jacket and tie and placed his wallet and keys in his pocket but didn’t know where to go, whom to ask for help. Since the hot July night when he’d looked for Judith Biely in a Madrid that had become alien to him, he’d lived in a state of lethargy, a sort of convalescence, in the empty apartment, going every day to his office in University City, now deserted except for patrols of militiamen, or people who stole building materials, or groups, almost always women, who walked the empty lots at first light to search among the previous night’s dead. Toward the middle of August, large families who’d fled to Madrid before the advancing enemy army camped in some of the unfinished buildings: waves of refugees with wooden-wheeled carts and donkeys and mules, bent under the weight of possessions they’d attempted to save: mattresses, furniture, metal bed frames, cages of chickens. They lit their fires and cooked their pots of food in the half-completed lobbies, just as they did in public gardens in the heart of Madrid or under the arches of metro stations. Their goats and sheep grazed on the weeds of future sports fields where corpses would randomly appear, hands tied behind their backs. Packs of boys with shaved heads chased one another up and down the staircases and abandoned scaffolding until they bumped into a corpse, the boldest boys daring to go through the pockets or remove an article of clothing in good condition. As on so many mornings when he left for his office, with purposeless obstinacy that at least allowed him the deception of a certain degree of normality, Ignacio Abel told Señorita Rossman not to worry. The porter, now in a proletarian coverall and beret, greeted him as unctuously as when he wore blue livery and a visored cap. “Still no news about the señora and your children, Don Ignacio? I wouldn’t worry. As I say, things are calmer in the Sierra, even if they’re on the other side, and it’s healthier for the children. And a summer away from Madrid is sure to do the señora good.” The porter said this knowingly: he’d learned the reason Adela spent the last two weeks of June in a sanatorium—she didn’t have weak lungs. He smiled, leaning forward and perhaps calculating the possibility of denouncing him now, since he knew that Ignacio Abel, though he’d saved himself once, wasn’t invulnerable. “I see the señor has had a visitor,” said the porter. “The foreign señorita asked for you and I let her up because I remembered seeing her when she came to give your children lessons. The truth is she looked like someone who’s had some sorrow, but these days who doesn’t have troubles?” He proffered the insinuation along with a cautious hand: he’d close his hand around the offered coin just as he’d clutch at a confidence that might be of benefit to him and perhaps harmful to the one who’d formulated it, his old status as gossip elevated in the new era to that of expert informer.

  He looked for Negrín in the Café Lion and was told he should look for him at the Workers’ Cooperative on Calle Piamonte, or at the War Ministry. His usual activity accelerated by the war, Negrín had always just left the place where Abel had almost found him. “Don Juan comes and goes all day,” said the man who shined shoes at the café and had an undying devotion to Negrín. “If he isn’t on his way up to the Sierra with his car full of bread and canned food for the boys in the militias, then he’s at a field hospital telling the nurses how to bandage wounds. You know how he is—that man never stops. And when he does have some free time, he comes here for me to shine his shoes and to drink down a mug of beer in one gulp. Too bad we don’t get the fresh prawns anymore that he likes so much. What a man. Things would’ve gone better for us if he’d been president when the insurgents rebelled. Though now you hear rumors that they’re going to name him to something big, a minister at least. What an honor. I tell him I’d like to be twenty years younger so I could go to the front and fight, and he tells me, ‘Agapito, if what you know how to do well is clean shoes, then clean shoes, it’s a noble trade. Things would be better for us Spaniards if instead of all of us talking so much, we worked harder at our trades.’ Would you like me to give him a message?” the shoeshine man asked Ignacio Abel. Hanging on the post office was an enormous half-torn poster of militiamen advancing, brandishing rifles with bayonets against a horizon of burned houses. The revolution was an apotheosis of typographies in strong colors, the war a catalogue of victories announced or predicted by newspapers in headlines that ended in exclamation points, and illustrated with pictures in photogravure of groups of ever-victorious volunteers raising rifles at the top of rugged crags or towers in towns just taken from the enemy. Ignacio Abel crossed the Castellana, which reeked of manure fermenting in the summer heat. Under the trees along the central paths, evacuees from the villages had hung their canvas tarps and made their fires, their donkeys tied to the trees. Where will they go when the cold weather begins and all of this isn’t over? How will it be possible to house and feed them if they keep arriving in increasing numbers, fleeing the enemy no one is stopping except in the fantasy of newspaper headlines and radio news reports? Where will the blankets come from, the winter uniforms, the boots to equip the militias who are now fighting bare-chested? He was stupefied to discover that without the links provided by his marriage to Adela and his affair with Judith Biely, he was almost totally lacking in social connections, a hermit who suddenly leaves his enclosure and knows nothing of the outside world. The relationships he’d established at work didn’t extend beyond the office, hadn’t evolved into friendships. Except for Judith, he didn’t recall ever having an intimate conversation with anyone. The cordiality he shared with Moreno Villa and Negrín was characterized by a strict reserve. A mixture of personal arrogance and keen class insecurity had always kept him at a distance from most of his fellow architects. Going around Madrid in search of Professor Rossman, stripped of the confidence his work, his family, even his lost lover had given him, he experienced his isolation as impotence, a lack of an anchor that had moved him away from things long before the city—the entire country—was set adrift by the upheaval of the military insurgency and a war. How solitary his life had been, an only child, then an orphan, entrusted to shadowy guardians, protected not so much by his intellectual abilities and determination to study as by the foresight of his father, who knew he was sick and saved money and took the steps necessary to continue protecting his son when he was no longer there, so he wouldn’t have to leave secondary school, so he could support himself at the university, watched over by his parents in the fulfillment of a destiny they had apportioned to him with their sacrifice. “My son, you’ll be so alone,” his mother said, touching his face with a hand deformed by work, in the provincial hospital bed where she lay dying. Her hand in his, grasping it, and one by one he had to loosen her fingers before letting it rest on the bed sheet. Only now did Ignacio Abel relive in memory the afternoon more than thirty years earlier when he’d walked from the East Cemetery to the dark porter’s lodging on Calle Toledo after burying his mother.

  If he hurried, if he was lucky, perhaps he could still save Professor Rossman. He knocked on the doors of quasi-official agencies and elegant houses that had been seized and, he’d been told, were now secret prisons. In the courtyards, car engines roared and men in civilian clothes armed with rifles and large pistols tucked diagonally between the shirt and waistband of their trousers blocked his path and subjected him to interrogations that didn’t always end when he opened his wallet to show his credentials: his Socialist Party and General Union of Workers membership cards, the safe-conduct issued to him so
he could continue visiting the suspended construction sites at University City. He said Professor Rossman’s name, explained his status as an eminent foreign anti-Fascist refugee in Spain, and showed the photograph his daughter had given him. He caught looks of possible recognition, gestures of complicity. He put the photo away after receiving a negative reply and continued searching: perhaps he ought to ask at the Academy of Fine Arts, at the State Security Office, at the police station on Calle Fomento. “This guy has the face of a dead man,” someone said to him, laughing. “You should look for him in the morgue, or on the San Isidro meadow. They have a picnic there every night.” He knocked on the doors of palaces decorated now by red or red-and-black flags, their façades covered with layer upon layer of propaganda posters. He made his way along narrow corridors filled with tobacco smoke, saw fatigued, garrulous, unshaven men talking on the phone, dictating lists of names to secretaries, all of them pulled along by a nervous urgency in which the presence of Ignacio Abel was an inconvenience: his insistence on making inquiries regarding someone no one knew anything about, repeating a name he had to spell over and over again, showing a photo that elicited an automatic negative response. In a salon with large balconies overlooking the Paseo de la Castellana, he approached with instinctive meekness a table with legs carved into lion’s claws, where a harried group of men, some wearing a suit and tie and with an official air and flanked by stenographers, judged or heard cases and examined papers. They passed around the photograph of Professor Rossman as if doubting its authenticity. One of them handed it back, shook his head, and gestured to an armed man in plain clothes sitting on a balcony. The guard seized Ignacio Abel’s arm and forced him out of the hall. “If I were you, I’d stop asking so many questions. Maybe this friend of yours turns out to be an insurgent and gets you in trouble.” As he walked down the staircase, he passed a group of militiamen pushing a man in handcuffs up the stairs, hitting him. For a moment their eyes met. In the man’s eyes was a plea for help; Ignacio Abel looked away.