She was a redheaded woman, stocky, energetic, careless in her dress, with features more central European than Latin and pronounced by age. I’ve seen Jewish women very much like her in the United States and in Buenos Aires: women of a certain age, fleshy, negligently dressed, lips brightly painted. She smoked a lot, unfiltered cigarettes, and conversed brilliantly, leaping between English and French according to her needs or limitations in expression, and she drank beer with a superb Scandinavian panache. She wrote book reviews for a newspaper and a radio program. The editor who had brought me to the luncheon, and who in the heat of conversation and the beer seemed not to remember I was there, had mentioned her influence when he introduced me, indicating that a favorable review from her was important to a book, especially one written by an unknown foreign author. I had the firm and melancholy conviction that the book, my reason for being in Copenhagen, would not attract Danish readers, so I was feeling remorse in advance for the bad deal the editor was getting from me, and I forgave him and was even grateful that at this luncheon at the Writer’s Club he had abandoned me to my fate. In any case, the event was not that successful; there were unoccupied tables in the large dining room with its mythological paintings. Before serving, the waiters had removed those settings.
I also noted with annoyance as Camille Safra was talking that she hadn’t said a word about the Danish edition of my book. She told me that her mother had died several months ago, in Copenhagen, and that in the last conversation she’d had with her the two of them agreed about details of that journey to France, especially something that had happened one night at a hotel in a small town near Lyon.
They were looking for relatives. Few had survived. Old neighbors and acquaintances looked on them with suspicion, perhaps fearing that they’d come back to make some claim, to accuse them or ask for an accounting. Camille’s mother had taken her to that small town—she didn’t give me the name—because someone had told her mother that one of her sisters took refuge there in early 1943. They found no record of the sister’s having been arrested, though neither was there any information about where she might be—and they never found out. People disappeared in those days, said Camille Safra, trails were lost; her aunt’s name was not on any list of deportees, repatriated, or dead. They came by train very early in the morning and ate a breakfast of cold coffee, black bread, and rancid butter in the station canteen. They asked questions of several unsociable early risers, who looked at them sullenly and refused to give the simplest information for fear of compromising themselves, since at that time collaborators were being flushed out.
Hungry, disoriented, strangers in the country that four years before had been theirs, their feet aching after walking all day, they found themselves, when night overtook them, in an open area near the shelter of a streetcar stop. They couldn’t return to Paris until the following morning. The streetcar had left them at a plaza with closed-up shops and with a monument to the fallen of the First World War; nearby was a street lamp lighting the sign of a hotel that called itself the Commerce.
They rented a room. They went upstairs to go straight to bed because the electricity would be turned off at nine. Sitting on the bed beneath a bulb that faded to pale red then revived to shed an oily yellow light, they shared a package of food they’d been given by the Red Cross. Then, dressed, and with their arms around each other, they lay down, icy feet touching beneath the thin blanket and threadbare bedspread. Her mother, Camille Safra told me, never locked doors; she was terrified of being trapped, of losing the key and not being able to get out. In the shelters, when the air-raid sirens sounded, she had attacks of sweating and panic. If they went to the movies, as soon as the film was over she rushed to the exit, for fear that everyone would leave before her and they would lock the doors, thinking the theater was empty.
Mother and daughter woke at dawn. Through the window, beneath the beating rain, they could see a rustic patio with chicken coops and an area of garden. They took turns washing with the icy cold water in the pitcher beneath the washstand and dressed in the drab, dignified, and inexpensive clothing they always wore, clothes that never kept them warm, just as there was never enough food to satisfy their hunger. When her mother tried to leave the room, the knob wouldn’t turn, the door wouldn’t open.
“I told you last night not to turn the key.”
“But I didn’t, I’m sure.”
The key lay on the dressing table opposite the bed. They inserted it in the lock, turned it this way and that, but nothing happened. The key didn’t click, it seemed not to meet any resistance, merely turned ineffectually in the lock. It wasn’t that it didn’t fit because it was the key to a different room. The mechanism appeared to function, but the door simply didn’t open.
The mother grew nervous. She rattled the doorknob and the key, beat on the lock, bit her lips. She said in a low voice that if they didn’t get out, they would miss the train to Paris and couldn’t go back to Denmark, would have to stay forever in France, where they had no one, where no one had given them so much as a smile of welcome, not even recognition. She took the key from the lock but then couldn’t get it back in, and when she finally did, refusing to let her daughter help her, she turned it so hard that the key broke in half.
“Why don’t we ask for help?” said Camille. “They’d laugh at us, two ridiculous Jews. Who ever would expect to be locked in like this?”
They tried the window: it, too, was impossible to open, although they didn’t see any latch, and of course there was no lock. They had to ask for help. A few minutes later, her mother, now out of control, her jaw hanging loose and her eyes glassy with fear—the fear she’d suffered during the flight that had saved her daughter four years before—beat on the door with desperation, yelling for help.
It was with relief that they heard footsteps on the stairs and along the hallway. The owner of the hotel, with the help of a wire, managed to extract from the lock the half of the key that had broken off, but when he introduced the master key, the door still wouldn’t open. From both sides, the door was pushed, shaken, and pounded, but it remained firmly locked, and the wood was too thick and the hinges too solid for them to batter it down.
Her mother was choking. She had sat down on the bed, in her black traveling clothes—ancient overcoat, small hat, and wide, misshapen shoes—and was breathing open-mouthed, nostrils flaring, wringing her hands or burying her face in them, the way she had when mother and daughter went down into the shelters during the raids at the beginning of the war. We’ll never get out of here, she kept saying, we shouldn’t have come back, this time they won’t let us leave. Camille then made a decision she was still proud of forty years later. She threw the washstand pitcher at the window, and as the glass broke, the cool, damp morning air flowed in. But it was too high for them to jump down to the patio, and the ladder someone went to look for never appeared.
They never did get the door open. An hour later the manager opened a second, sealed door hidden behind an armoire that the two of them struggled to pull away.
Despite all this, they caught a train to Paris that same morning. Her mother led her by the hand, squeezing hard, and told her that they were going back to Denmark and that she would never again set foot in France. In the train compartment, she was as pale, and looked as worn, as if she’d been traveling a long, long time, like many of the refugees and exiles in those times who were seen wandering around stations, waiting days, entire weeks, for trains to arrive that had no schedule or precise destinations, because in many places tracks had been twisted and bridges destroyed by bombings or sabotage. One gentleman with an air of genteel penury very like theirs offered the girl half of the orange he unrolled from a very clean handkerchief and peeled with extreme tidiness while they had tried not to look or notice the tart, tempting aroma that filled the air, erasing the usual odors of sweaty clothes and tobacco smoke. He was the first person to smile at them since they arrived in France. They struck up a conversation, and the mother told him the name of t
he town and the hotel where they’d spent the night. When he heard it, the man stopped smiling. He was also the only one they’d met who spoke without caution or fear.
“That was a good hotel before the war,” he told them. “But I’ll never go in it again. During the occupation the Germans converted it into a barracks for the Gestapo. Terrible things happened in those rooms. People passing through the town plaza heard screams, though they acted as if nothing were wrong.”
When she stopped talking, Camille Safra shook her head slowly and smiled with her eyes closed. When she opened them, they were moist and shining. Those eyes had been beautiful in her youth, when she traveled with her mother through France on that train and had shyly and enviously looked at the orange the man in her car so carefully peeled on his white handkerchief. She told me that toward the end of her mother’s life, in the hospital room where Camille spent nights beside her bed, her mother waked at times from a nightmare and asked her not to lock the door, breathing through her open mouth, staring at her with eyes wide with fear, fear not only for her approaching death but also, and perhaps worse, for the death she and her daughter had escaped forty-five years before.
At the end of the luncheon at the Writer’s Club, several toasts were made with excessive fervor. I don’t remember whether any was in my honor, but perhaps they were in Danish and I didn’t understand them. The clearest memory I have of that trip to Copenhagen, aside from the misanthropic statue of Kierkegaard and the Andalusian red tiles of Pepe’s Bar, is of the journey the woman named Camille Safra made during the rainy, lugubrious autumn of the war’s end in Europe. While traveling, you hear and tell tales of journeys. “Wherever a man goes, he takes his novel with him,” Galdós writes in Fortunata y Jacinata. But sometimes, looking at travelers who never say a word to anyone but sit silent and impenetrable beside me in their plane seat or who drink their drink in the dining car or stare at the monitor showing a movie, I wonder about the stories they know and aren’t telling, about the novels each carries inside, the journeys lived or heard or imagined that they must be remembering as they travel in silence at my side, shortly before disappearing forever from my sight, their faces forgotten, as mine is to them, like those of Franz Kafka on the Vienna express or Niceto Alcalá Zamora on a bus traveling through the desolate landscape of northern Argentina.
those who wait
AND YOU, WHAT WOULD you do if you knew that at any moment they could come for you, that your name may already be on a typed list of prisoners or future dead, or suspects, or traitors? Maybe right now someone has penciled in a mark beside your name, taking the first step in a proceeding that will lead to your arrest and possibly your death, or to the immediate necessity of leaving the country, or temporarily, merely, to the loss of your job or of certain minor perks you wouldn’t find too hard to give up. They notified Josef K. of his trial, but no one arrested him; it didn’t even seem that they were watching him. You know how it goes, or at least you should be able to imagine it, you’ve seen what happens to others close to you, neighbors who disappear, or had to flee, or stayed as if there were no danger, no threat to them. At night you’ve heard footsteps on the stairs and in the hall that lead to the door of your apartment, and you feared that this time it was for you, but the footsteps stopped before they reached your door, or went by, and you heard the pounding on another door, and the car you heard drive away later took someone who could have been you, although you prefer not to believe it, telling yourself they have no reason to arrest you or any of yours, at least for now. You never did anything, never stood out in any way. You belonged to the Party since you were very young, and Comrade Stalin’s picture hangs in the dining room of your home. You’re a Jew, but only by blood, your parents brought you up in the Protestant religion, and to love Germany. In the summer of 1914, as soon as war was declared, you enlisted, you received an Iron Cross for bravery in combat, you don’t belong to any Jewish organization, you don’t feel the least sympathy for Zionism: you are, intimately, by education, by language, even physically, German through and through.
It is hard to get from one day to the next, to break with everything, with ties of the heart and habits of daily life, hard not to be crushed by the thought of losing your home, your books, your favorite easy chair, the normalcy you have always known; hard to endure despite the pounding on the neighbors’ door or the shot that in an instant has cut short a life, or the rocks thrown through the windows of the tailor shop or the neighborhood grocery where one morning a coarsely painted Star of David appeared along with a single word that in its brevity contains the greatest insult: Juden. You plan to do your buying at the usual shop every day, but today in front of it a group of men wearing brown shirts and armbands with swastikas are holding a placard, Anyone who buys from Jews is backing the foreign boycott and destroying the German economy, so you lower your head and change course as unobtrusively as possible. You go into a nearby shop, hiding your shame; after all, the boycott of Jewish businesses is in effect only on Saturdays, at least it was in the beginning, the spring of 1933, and if the next day, or that same afternoon, you meet your usual shopkeeper, who knows you didn’t come to do your shopping, you can look away or cross the street instead of going up to him and shaking his hand, or not even that, speaking a few normal words, showing a sign of fraternity that’s not necessarily Jewish, simply human, like lifelong neighbors. Things happen little by little, very gradually, and if at first you prefer to imagine that things aren’t that serious, that normalcy cannot be shattered so easily, the prophets of doom irritate you more than ever, those who point to the threat that grows nearer because they articulate it, that might go away if only they would pretend not to notice it. You wait, you do nothing. With patience and a low profile it will not be difficult to wait out these times. In 1932, traveling on a boat down the Rhine, Maria Teresa León saw thousands of small swastika-printed flags stuck into tiny buoys and bobbing along on the current. On Thursday, March 30, 1933, Professor Victor Klemperer, of Dresden, notes in his diary that in a toy-shop window he saw a child’s balloon with a large swastika. I can no longer rid myself of the disgust and shame. Yet no one makes a move; everyone trembles, hides. But Professor Klemperer does not plan to leave Germany, at least not at this time, for where will he go at his age, almost sixty, and with a wife who is ill, and now that they’ve bought a small bit of land where they hope to build a house? So many people beginning new lives other places, and here we are waiting, our hands tied. But who in his right mind can believe that a situation like this will last long, that well into the twentieth century such barbarism and senselessness can prevail in a civilized country? Surely the Nazis, so brutal, so demented, will be rejected by the German people in the end, and the international community will refuse to acknowledge them. Except sometimes, when you think you’re getting away from danger, you are hypnotically drawn to it, as if by a magnet, the powerful desire to be caught and thus end the anguish of the waiting once and for all. But neither is an expatriate safe. In remote Mexico, in a house turned into a fortress, protected by armed guards and barbed wire and concrete walls, Leon Trotsky waits for the arrival of Stalin’s emissary, who will come slipping past barred doors and guards and stand alone before him and fire a bullet into his head, or lean over him with the solicitude of Judas and sink a climber’s ice pick into the nape of his neck, as efficient as a bullet. It is summer, August 1940. Klemperer, no longer a professor, notes undramatically in his diary that after July 6 Jews are forbidden to enter public parks. In France, in the late, warm twilight of early June, three men fleeing together before the advance of the German army went deep into a forest. One of them, the oldest, most corpulent, and best dressed, turned up several months later, hanged, his decomposed cadaver fallen to the ground and half hidden beneath the autumn leaves. The branch on which he hanged himself, or was hanged, had broken beneath his weight. A German fleeing Germans, but also once a Communist, though the Communists had declared him a traitor and decreed his execution. The two fleeing
with him were Soviet agents who had traveled to France with the one goal of finding and killing him. Not even hiding among the throngs of refugees from the war, or behind a cement wall topped with broken glass and a tangle of barbed wire, will you be safe. You escape your country and become stateless, and one morning when you wake in the room of a hotel for foreigners, where you are living in miserable conditions, you hear loudspeakers shouting orders in your own language, and out the window you see the same uniforms you thought you had saved yourself from by crossing borders and distance. In 1938 the Viennese Jew Hans Mayer escaped from Austria; with false documents he traveled across a Europe of black predictions and hostile borders, took refuge in Antwerp, Belgium, and only two years later the same boots and armored cars and martial music that invaded Vienna were echoing through the streets of this city in which he had never ceased to be a foreigner. In 1943 he was captured by the men in leather coats and snap-brim hats from whom he had been running since 1938, more precisely, since the night of March 15, just after Hitler entered Vienna, when he, Hans Mayer, took the 11:15 express to Prague. He had pictured the scene of his arrest for so many years that when it finally came, he felt he had already lived it. Only one thing he had not foreseen: those who arrested him, asked the first questions, and delivered the first blows did not have the faces of men of the Gestapo, or even of police. If a member of the Gestapo can have a normal face, then any normal face can belong to the Gestapo.
In Moscow, the night of April 27, 1937, Margarete Buber-Neumann noticed that one of the KGB agents who came to arrest her husband was wearing small, round rimless glasses, which gave his very young face an intellectual air. That impression is substantiated by Nadezhda Mandelstam, who suffered from the harassment of the secret police and says that the youngest of them were known for their sophisticated tastes and a weakness for literature. At one in the morning, there was pounding on the door of their room in the Hotel Lux, where employees and foreign activists of the Comintern were housed. In 1920, Professor Fernando de los Ríos had lodged there, sent by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party with the task of reporting on Soviet Russia. He had interviewed Lenin and was surprised by the man’s resemblance to the Spanish writer Pío Baroja, and by his scorn for the liberties and the lives of common people.
Sepharad Page 5
