by Russ Rymer
The letter—in an envelope addressed to Saxe and awaiting me in Portbou, and that I opened at Saxe’s Portbou table—came bundled with two other documents: a flyer for an upcoming antiwar rally and another old letter, penned, for once, by someone other than A.
This second missive was nearly as confounding as A.’s letters, except that it contained an important key. A couple of them, actually (well, three, if you include the revelation that A.’s full name was Alba): a date, 1939, and a place, Le Vernet, that rang a dull bell in my mind. Here was a thing I’d heard of, courtesy of old Aunt Bettina, who had haunted my childhood like some incorporeal goad—never there physically, yet the source and locus and inspiration for a hundred breakfast lectures on the dangers and depravities of history, especially in the era of the Spanish Civil War. It seems my aunt had considered herself a great friend of Spain, and, traveling with her husband in Europe in the 1930s as part of a Quaker relief effort, was close enough to events to respectably claim an opinion. Roy and Alice, stay-at-homes that they were (unique among their conference-trotting faculty set, they’d never gone abroad), had treasured her adventures and regaled me with accounts, when I was far too young to care, of how the elected Spanish Republican government fought the revolt of the Fascist “nationalists” and of the horrors that had ensued and of the many defeated Republican loyalists who had ended up in French internment camps like the one named Le Vernet.
I recalled few of the details beyond the sulfur taste of unwanted extracurricular history lessons. But I did remember that the era was not one to enter unprepared, this war being more replete with atrocities on all sides even than your everyday, average war, and endless in its convolutions. Why can’t Europeans ever learn to conduct their internal spats along simple, straightforward, blue-and-gray, Redcoat-and-Minuteman, easy-to-comprehend lines? Though, to be serious, I would later confound the stories, the cautionary family tales of the ancient bloodbath in Spain with the television newscasts of the American quagmire that overshadowed my youth, and robbed you of yours, and I would come to wonder if the sulfur taste wasn’t the flavor of premonition.
The history book I would purchase on a subsequent outing to serve as a concordance to the letters and a guide through the thicket (and to repair my regret that I hadn’t paid better attention as an eleven-year-old) had the effect of restoring Roy and Alice’s depictions to full luster: how the Republicans, cut off from the world but supported by Russia and the volunteers of the International Brigades, fell to Generalissimo Franco’s Fascists, who were supported by the Spanish Catholics and the ruthless Falange, Mussolini, Hitler, and Henry Ford. How when the war was over, Franco didn’t relax in the afterglow of victory but continued with a brutal cleansing campaign of reprisal, murder, torture, terror, imprisonment, and exile, the exiles being the lucky ones among the leftists, the refugees who made it across the border to France.
Vernet d’Ariège
February 17, 1939
Dear Monsieur Landers,
You may remember your wife introducing us at Hospital Obrero on your visit. I’m also a nurse with Red Aid. I write concerning her and asking if you have news on her whereabouts. I must hope she is already with you, but I have recently heard she was captured. Here is what I can relate. She and I made it away after Ebro and it was our intention to head to Barcelona, but with some worry I would be hunted there by Communists, as last time. (I am with POUM. On the front such things never mattered.)
And that was just more of the mess, how the Republicans were riven by fratricide, much of it instigated by their Moscow allies, pitting leftist against leftist, anarchist against anarcho-syndicalist against Communist against Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (or Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, this woman’s POUM), an anti-Stalinist organization Stalin tried to exterminate, and so I continued reading.
We did not take the train straight to the city, as I would be recognized, but were able to ride most of the way on convoys and stayed a couple of days in a village where Alba knew a family. They’d hardly enough for themselves. They thought we’d be stupid to go into the city, and so we walked instead towards the mountains. Open country where the roads were blocked. Alba well, and excited to be walking towards you, this meant everything. She decided she should make a last detour. Not to Barcelona but Madrid, to be sure friends were safe. Also she was feeling her condition and wary of the climb, I think. So we said goodbye. I write from a French camp. We are prisoners, so the dangers are different. The guards allow women to bicycle into the village to market and the post. I am so miserable with myself that Alba would be here with me now if I had only insisted. Please write with anything you have heard. Brigaders brought in last week recount they heard she was seized and taken to Jorge Juan police station. Maybe by Falangists, I’m not sure, but anyway she was seen to be detained. Can something be done? I will write you with any news.
Saludos,
Salina Contrerras
PS: Arrival today confirms Falange. Saw Alba loaded on truck to Ventas. I do not know this man. POUM, though.
—S.C.
Mobilisation
CONTRE LA GUERRE!!!
LA VIOLENCE CONTRE LA VIOLENCE
quand c’est nécessaire!!
ARRÊTEZ L’IMPERIALISME AMÉRICAIN
Le moment, c’est maintenant!!!
OÙ ÊTES-VOUS???
Where are you??? The protest rally advertised by the mimeographed flyer was to take place this very night—The moment’s now!!!—in some establishment (this alone made it sound possibly amusing) called the Winter Church.
Faites partie de la solution—
—Venez!—
à un meeting pour décider d’un plan d’action
Le comité pour la Justice et la Paix
à 21 heures
Église d’Hiver
“Air War!”
The announcement and ensuing rat-a-tat-tat interrupted my perusal of the flyer. I slid the handwritten pages and the mimeographed one back into the envelope and gave Passim an ungenerous stare. “Have you told her?” I demanded.
He blinked at me. “I’ve told her nothing,” he said. “We haven’t spoken. It came under the door, like the others.”
“So she has no idea what’s happened to Saxe.” I tried hard to make the sentence sound grim.
“I suppose not, no,” he said, his voice contrite. Then, cheerfully: “If I see her, of course I’ll explain to her.”
“Don’t,” I said.
“Non?”
I considered the options for a second. “No. Best not. Just tell her I do need to meet her.”
“First time I run into her!” Passim exclaimed.
“Well, maybe you could make a point of running into her,” I said, my frustration breaking through, and I immediately felt unreasonable. Passim’s head bobbed in deferential objection.
“Actually, Passim, never mind,” I said. “I should handle this.”
His nodding continued, though now in agreement, and he was still annoyingly agreeable as I left the café and headed home. In truth, I left excited. Out of the blue, a name—Dilthy—had sprung to mind, and with it, a method and a plan.
Cutting away from my route before I entered my impasse, I began a topologist’s circumnavigation of the block, which basically meant: I put my left shoulder by the wall and walked. Block is too simple a description to apply realistically to many street squares in Paris, and this jagged acre was a worthy demonstration of why. It was riddled with alleys and cutoffs and setbacks and turnabouts, curlicues and cross streets. I’d perused my Michelin map of the district but could not begin to guess what rue or avenue or boulevard the palace’s windows might overlook, what vista they commanded. I tried to reconstruct in my mind the inner contours of the grand flat that I had, just a few hours ago, toured: two rooms and then a corner, four rooms more and a corner again. It was hopeless. I couldn’t fit the internal trip to any aerial overview. That’s where Dilthy came in.
Dilthy was a blind surgeon I once
knew, or, rather, a surgeon who had in the middle of an accomplished career lost his sight. He was sometimes called in on difficult cases where every attempt at diagnosis had failed. He’d attended one of my own operations, a parathyroidectomy gone cryptic. The patient showed every symptom of overactive parathyroids, the little neck glands whose hormones regulate calcium levels. Her bones had been chewed to brittleness, and her heart was at risk of a dangerous arrhythmia, but there was a catch in the diagnosis: two of her four parathyroids, makers of the culprit hormone, had already been removed. A hyperparathyroidism patient deprived of parathyroids was, in essence, no longer a patient—she had crossed into the category of medical oddity and would be placed on constant dialysis that would keep her connected to tubes for the rest of her bedridden and most likely not-so-lengthy life, and that’s where Dilthy came in. The man couldn’t read an x-ray or a patient’s chart, but his hands were exquisite and his diagnostics sensual, and he traced every structure and organ of our patient’s excavated neck until he was fondling—with an almost erotic slowness and attentiveness—her clavicle, where he came upon the evildoer hiding under the fascia. Evildoers: two rogue parathyroid glands that had spontaneously developed far from their home in the middle neck and set up shop in the woman’s shoulder, there to pump out their poisonous superfluity. They were removed within the quarter-hour, and the woman’s life resumed.
I wanted Dilthy with me now. My tactile exploration of the block brought me down garbage alleys and onto loading docks, through an underpass where I couldn’t be sure that the property I sought wasn’t crossing directly overhead, and past locked courtyards, where, without a key or code, I had to abandon my method altogether. After I had jogged around a jigsaw’s worth of curves and juts, thwartings and discouragings, I bumped at last into a telltale sign. A sign, literally. Set into the wall a foot below the blue ceramic plaque announcing rue Nin was an older sign, its metal signature rusting through the paint, that read (as best as I could make it out) R E G N VER .
I smiled at this pentimento as though greeting an intervening angel, a memory rusting through my consciousness. Wasn’t Ganivert—rue Ganivert 40—the address of the mysterious glycinage in one of A.’s (aka Alba’s) letters? I turned and idled down the avenue’s length. The building numbers were in the 100s, but the numbers, I told myself, like the name of the street, could easily have been altered, and when I got to the building I was looking for, I did find a FORTY carved in the red stone of the entry that directly repudiated the 136 by the curb. The number wasn’t the giveaway, only the confirmation, for I’d spotted my quarry from half a block away. It would have been hard to miss, frankly. The façade of 136 (née 40) receded squarely from the street to accommodate a jewel-like park or yard fenced off from the sidewalk by tall iron pickets topped with gold spear points. The gate in the fence was framed by a columned entry gazebo (of classical pretension; it reminded me of the belvedere atop the island in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont) whose lintel bore, along with the obsolete number, a name, The Wisteria, spelled out in its English entirety, definite article and proper noun, both capitals and both tittles, in sculpted red-stone vinery. I walked under the lintel and into the gazebo. Beside the locked gate was an aluminum-and-plastic-faced intercom directory on which the Wisteria’s residents were itemized alphabetically. I ran my finger down the list. None of the names was familiar.
Qu’est-ce qu’on fait? There are times—rare enough, I assure you—when there’s a benefit to being a middle-aged, middle-class woman of middling complexion and middlebrow appearance whose capacity for, say, breaking and entering, no one would ever suspect. I waited, and in not so very great a while, a man arrived and unlocked the gate and let himself into the yard, and I followed along behind him with a smile and a nod and looking benignly flustered. He paid no mind, even held the gate for me. We sashayed down the short walk together and when he’d gone into the building and the door had closed, I turned to the mailboxes, a row of old, varnished oak fasciae set into the marble wall. I didn’t have to look far to find what I sought. I started at the right end of the row, which I thought might represent upper floors, and the name I coveted was the very first one I encountered: LANDERS, C., undoubtedly the very Monsieur Landers to whom had been addressed the letter from Le Vernet announcing the capture of Alba, “your wife.”
On my way out, I turned to stare up—yes, those could be the windows. The Wisteria’s crowning floor was obviously an outsize penthouse, its mansard palisade tall as a top hat. Which pair of windows belonged to the study? I wondered (might someone be looking out?). How many more lay beyond it, opening into rooms I had not even reached? Beyond ogling, I wasn’t sure what to do next. There was no buzzer for Landers, C., and even if I could buzz him, what would I say? Hi, I stole into your flat this morning? And Oh yes, I’ve also been reading your mail? I was out of my depth. I headed back to Portbou. If nothing else, I could find the gentleman’s number in the café’s phone book and make my confessions at a somewhat safer remove.
I also had a question for poor, beleaguered Passim; a few of them, actually. I was suddenly of a mind to present the whole problem to him, draft him fully into my mission of locating the individual who seemed to hold the key, this phantom letter courier. I turned the corner and saw the café door, and all such plans sped out of my head, replaced by an urge to flee, or to clench my fists and bellow. Standing in his uniform at parade rest next to his limousine was Drôlet. I didn’t run, and didn’t scream, not yet. I marched right past him and into Portbou. Passim was standing there by the zinc, twirling a rag in his hand, nervous. He shrugged at me as I entered. I could hear Drôlet behind me, pushing through the door. “Salaam,” he said.
“Salaam. Keefak?” Passim returned politely, with a bow of the head. How are you?
Before the driver could answer, I wheeled to face him. “How dare you!” I said. “Why have you come here!”
I had not realized until precisely that moment what solace I’d taken in my hideaway, how much my secret had meant to me. And to have my idyll’s walls breached by, of all people, my Clairière capo—and, by the way, when had he breached them? Had he tailed my hotel umbrella on an early visit, known where I was all the while? My indignation mounted, but my invective devolved into a stutter that I must concede was uninspired, repetitions varying only in volume.
“How dare you follow me!” I shouted as I edged around the immobilized chauffeur and backed toward the exit, and then, to clinch the deal (and did I actually clench my fists? I think I did), “How dare you!” and I turned to storm out and barged full force into the embrace of the man coming through the door. Which is to say, right into Sahran’s embrace.
The car whispered smoothly through the traffic, headed down Saint-Germain toward the Invalides. Sahran leaned near to me in the back seat, his knee drawn up beside him and his thoughts knotted up in some big ardent tangle of life and law and art. Even absent art and law, my life was feeling tangled—witness the fact that I was here, wherever here was, listening to Sahran’s soliloquy, whatever it meant.
Does a person’s portrait become universal only when the person himself is forgotten? Since, according to the Islamic traditions—hadith—saints are generally not depicted in art, does that make oblivion sacred? “Forgive me,” he said, with a laugh, “I’m off on a toot!” He allowed me a moment to admire his Americanism. “But you will see. This is exactly what Ralu will demand of me when we get there.” Wherever there was, whoever she. “But it’s an interesting question, after all: Must one be personally obliterated to assume one’s true importance?” It was clear, at least, that we’d traveled far from the phrases that had launched our journey, the pleas and exhortings, the supplicating without supplication that had won my agreement to come along.
Sahran’s wooing in Portbou had convinced me of his diplomatic bona fides. He’d released me right away from our collisionary hug, a good thing, since I consider being hugged while angry a lackluster combination. It smacks of the straitjacket. You would reme
mber, Daniel, I should hope you’d remember, never to try to constrain me when I’m riled, or, even worse, placate me, or especially touch my neck, I lose all irony. I lose control and I’m liable to throw an unironic punch (and have done so once or twice) if not something sharper.
Sahran happily eluded that fate, for the moment, and my emancipation from his clutches drained away my panic. Also, it calmed me that his hands, as he released me, quickly smoothed the length of my arms and found my hands and squeezed them, and I was also soothed by his voice. “I would never have come if I weren’t worried. May we sit for a moment?” He assured me the imposition was his, not Drôlet’s, that he was concerned that my abandonment of the Clairière was the result of burdens he’d placed on me, and could I perhaps accompany him on a mission, nonmedical but possibly of interest, in essence a simple parcel delivery, and we could talk on the way.
