Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  With beating hearts we fixed our attention on the sound of boots coming closer and closer. As happened every night, Margarete—Greta—had lain awake in the dark, listening to footsteps in the corridors, jumping every time the lights in the stairway were turned on. If the lights on the stairs and in the corridors of the Hotel Lux were turned on after midnight, it was for the KGB men, who prowled the dark, empty streets of Moscow in black vans everyone called crows. They didn’t use the elevators, maybe out of fear that some mechanical failure or interruption of electrical current would allow a victim to escape. But the victims never escaped, they didn’t even try, lying motionless, paralyzed, in their rooms, in the bleakness of their lives, and when finally the KGB did come for them, they offered no resistance, didn’t fight or scream with rage or panic, didn’t have a weapon ready to shoot their way out or blow their head off at the last instant. For years Heinz Neumann, leader of the German Communist Party, knew that he was a marked man, that his name was on the list, and still he went with his wife to the Soviet Union after the triumph of Nazism in Germany. He did not try to take refuge in a different country but lived in Moscow, aware of how the circle of suspicion and hostility was tightening around him every day, how his old friends stopped talking to him, how one after another comrades disappeared, those he had trusted but who had turned out to be traitors, Trotskyite conspirators, enemies of the people. Now no one visited him and his wife in their room in the Hotel Lux, nor did they visit anyone for fear of compromising them, of contaminating others with their always imminent disgrace, postponed day after day and night after night. If the telephone rang, they sat looking at it without daring to answer, and when they picked up the receiver, they heard a click and knew that someone was listening. There was a time when they covered the telephones with blankets or heavy clothing because a rumor said that even when the receivers were down it was possible to hear conversation in a room.

  In the summer of 1932, Heinz Neumann and his wife had been Stalin’s personal guests at a resort on the Black Sea. The night of April 27, 1937, when the pounding comes at their door, Greta Neumann is lying wide awake in the darkness, but her husband doesn’t wake up, not even when she turns on the light and the uniformed men enter. The three of them stand around the bed, and one of them, maybe the youngest, the one with the rimless glasses, yells his name, but Neumann turns beneath the blankets and faces the wall, as if refusing with all the strength of his soul to wake. When finally he opens his eyes, an almost childish horror floods his features, and then his face turns slack and gray. While the men search the room and examine each of his books, husband and wife sit facing each other, and both feel their knees trembling. A piece of paper falls to the floor from one of the books, and the guard who picks it up identifies it as a letter from Stalin sent to Neumann in 1926. “Worse and worse,” murmurs the guard, folding it back again. The husband and wife’s knees touch, each with the identical tremble, like an ague that can’t be stopped. Outside the room, in the hotel corridors, as outside their windows, they begin to hear the faint sounds of people waking up, of the city coming to life before the first light of day. The dawn came slowly behind the window curtains.

  In 1935, Professor Klemperer was let go from the university, but because of his status as a war veteran he continued to receive a small pension. It would be a few years before he would be forbidden to drive a car, own a radio or telephone, go to the movies, have a pet. Professor Klemperer and his wife, always in such delicate health, given to neuralgia and melancholy, liked cats and films, especially musicals, very much.

  They have been threatened, they know that at any moment they can be put under arrest or killed, but in the street the sunlight is the same as it always has been, cars drive by, stores are open, neighbors greet one another, mothers hold their children’s hands on the way to school and before they leave them at the fence in front of the entrance squat down to turn up the lapels of their overcoats or to wrap them more tightly in their mufflers and caps. One November day in 1936, Professor Klemperer, who was taking advantage of the forced leisure of his retirement to write a scholarly book on eighteenth-century French literature, arrived at the university library, but the librarian who had helped him every day for many years told him, with distress, that she was no longer authorized to lend the professor books, and that he shouldn’t come back anymore. You have been marked, sentenced. In the reading room you cannot enter now, people are bent in thought over opened volumes, under the soft light of the low, green-shaded lamps. You go outside, knowing that your days are numbered, that you should seize what time you have left and flee, at least make the attempt, but the man at the kiosk sells you your newspaper just as on any other morning, the bus makes its usual punctual stops every few minutes, and then it seems to you that the curse is in you, something that makes you different from the others, more vulnerable, worse, unworthy of the normal life they’re enjoying, though you stubbornly believe that maybe it’s due to some error, some misunderstanding that will be cleared up in time. In May 1940, Professor Klemperer is denounced by a neighbor for not having properly closed his windows during a blackout; he is arrested and locked in a cell, but released after one week.

  Waiting for an inevitable disaster is worse than the disaster itself. On September 1, 1936, Eugenia Ginzburg, a professor at the University of Kazan, a Communist leader, editor of a Party journal, and wife of a member of the Central Committee, receives the notice that she is forbidden to give classes. She is a young and enthusiastic mother of two small children, a fervent adherent of each and every one of the Party’s directives, convinced that the country is swarming with saboteurs and spies in the service of imperialism, traitors whom it is right to unmask and punish with the greatest firmness. Every day in meetings of cells and committees, in the newspapers, on the radio, new arrests are announced, and Eugenia Ginzburg is surprised by some of them but remains convinced of their necessity and justice.

  One day she learns that she herself is under suspicion: nothing very serious, it seems at first, but it is irritating, and even unpleasant, a mistake that must eventually be resolved since it is unthinkable that the Party would accuse an innocent, and she, Eugenia Ginzburg, does not find in herself the least shadow of guilt, not the slightest uncertainty or weakness in her blind revolutionary faith. You believe you know who you are, but suddenly you’ve become something others want to see in you, then you’ve become a stranger to yourself, and your own shadow is the spy following your footsteps, and in your eyes you see the look of your accusers, those who cross the street to avoid saying hello or lower their head when they pass. But life is slow to change, and at first a person refuses to notice the alarm signals, to question the order and solidity of the world that has begun to break apart, the everyday reality in which large holes, pits of darkness even at midday, begin to open, where at any moment you may hear loud pounding at the door of the dining room where your children have lunch or do their homework, and the ring of the telephone cuts the air like an icy steel blade, like a fatal shot.

  Eugenia Ginzburg is summoned at odd hours to meetings that turn out to be interrogations; it is suggested to her that she will be punished, because at one time she was connected with the university, or worked in the Party with someone who was a traitor, or didn’t denounce someone with the proper revolutionary zeal. But the meeting, the interrogation, ends, and she is allowed to go home, and if there are people who have begun to pretend they don’t see her or change course if she is walking toward them, others tell her to be calm, give her advice, say that nothing will happen, she’ll see, everything will work out in the end. Only one woman warns her of the danger: her husband’s mother, who is an old and maybe illiterate woman from a small village, shakes her head with resignation and remembers that all this happened before, in the times of the czars. Eugenia, they’re setting a trap for you, and you must run away while you can, before they have your head. But why would I, a Communist, hide from my Party? I must show the Party that I’m innocent. They speak in
low voices, trying not to let the children hear, afraid that the telephone, even though the receiver’s down, will allow someone to listen. On February 7, Eugenia Ginzburg is called to yet another meeting, which is less disagreeable, and at the end of it the comrade who has been interrogating her gets to his feet with a smile; she thinks he will shake her hand, maybe tell her that the misunderstandings and suspicions are clearing up, but the man asks her rather casually, as if remembering a minor bureaucratic detail he’d almost overlooked, to leave her Party card with him. At first she doesn’t understand, or can’t believe what she’s heard: she looks at this comrade and the smile disappears from his serene face, then she opens her handbag and looks for the card she always carries with her, and when she hands it to him, he takes it without a glance toward her and puts it in one of his desk drawers.

  For eight days she waits. She stays home, in her room, not answering the telephone, barely noticing what is going on around her, the presence of her children, who move quietly, as if in a house where someone is ill, the company of her husband, who comes and goes like a shadow and raps quietly at the door and says in a low voice, “Open up, it’s me.” Now they begin to doubt whether innocence is enough to save her, they burn papers and books, old letters, any manuscript or printed page that might draw attention during a search. At night they lie awake, silent and rigid in the darkness, and shiver every time they hear a car coming down the silent street or see headlights through the window, flashing diagonally across the walls of the room. Their fear lasts from the moment they hear the car in the distance until it fades and is lost at the end of the street. In Kazan, as in Moscow, the only cars moving about at such hours are the black vans of the KGB. Russia is very large, Eugenia, take a train and go hide in our village. Our little summer house is empty and the windows are sealed, and it has a garden with apple trees.

  It happened during the day, on the morning of February 15, and they didn’t knock at the door, they called by telephone. How can the everyday life you love and know, that’s filled with routine and things taken for granted, end so suddenly, and forever? How can this cold morning with the bright light on the snow that seems like so many others be the last? Eugenia was ironing, and her son was having breakfast at the kitchen table, drinking from a large cup. Her daughter had gone out to skate. The telephone rang, and at first she and her husband stood looking at it, not moving, not looking at each other. But it could be a call from anyone, maybe from the school, maybe their little girl had fallen while she was skating and the teacher was calling to tell them to come get her, that it wasn’t serious. After several rings, her husband went to the telephone, lifted the receiver, and nodded as he listened to what they were telling him.

  “Eugenia,” he said, wanting, in vain, to make his voice sound normal, “it’s for you.” Maybe the boy dipped a piece of bread in his cup of milk and didn’t even look up. “Comrade,” said a young, well-mannered voice on the telephone, “would you have a moment sometime today to come by our office?”

  Eugenia Ginzburg buttoned up the boy’s overcoat and sent him out to skate with his sister. She pulled his cap down tight, covered half his face with his muffler, went with him to the door, waved good-bye as he walked off down the snowy street, and never saw him again. No one had come looking for her, no one had pointed a gun at her, handcuffed her, or shoved her into a black van, she just went out as she did any morning and walked toward the station; she could blend in with the crowd converging on the platform as a train approached, and get on, and maybe no one would notice her face. “I’m not doing anything,” she had told the well-mannered man on the phone. “I’ll come right now.” She’d wanted to go alone, but her husband insisted on going with her. Outside, when she heard the familiar sound of the door closing behind her, she thought calmly that she would never hear it again, that she would never step across that threshold again. They walked in silence across the unbroken snow radiating whiteness in the gray February morning. They didn’t hug each other when they went their separate ways at the entrance to the building where the men were waiting for her: to say good-bye would have been to recognize the abyss opening between them. Her husband said, “You’ll see, you’ll be home by suppertime.” She nodded and pushed open the door. As she went in, she turned back and saw him standing motionless in the snow in the middle of the street, his mouth open and eyes afraid. For years, in disciplinary cells, in the stinking cars of trains that never reached their destination, in icy barracks in deserts of snow, in the hallucination of fever and hunger, in the debilitation of forced labor, in the eternal dusk of the polar circle, Eugenia Ginzburg saw that face, the expression she wouldn’t have caught if she hadn’t turned that one time before pushing a door that opened to the busy sound of footsteps, voices, and typewriters.

  Three weeks later, on March 8, 1937, Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, who were on a trip to Moscow, were received by Stalin in a large office in the Kremlin. María Teresa León remembered him as bent over and smiling. He had short little teeth, as if his pipe had worn them away. They talked about the war in Spain and about Soviet aid to the Republic. On one wall was a large map of Spain, with pins and little flags indicating the positions of the armies. On another, a map of Madrid. Stalin asked María Teresa León if it would bother her if he lit his pipe. He talked with them for more than two hours, promising them weapons, planes, military instructors. He smiled at us the way you smile at children you want to encourage. Many years later, far from Spain, lost in the duration and distance of exile, María Teresa León remembered Stalin with a kind of distant tenderness. To us he seemed slim and sad, burdened by something, maybe by his fate.

  WHEN THEY BEGAN the deportation of Jews from Dresden, Professor Klemperer felt temporarily safe because he was married to an Aryan woman. For the moment, I’m safe. As safe as someone can be on the gallows with a rope around his neck. Any day now a new law can kick the platform from under my feet, and then I’m a hanged man. Men came to get Greta Buber-Neumann on June 19, 1938, but when they showed her the arrest warrant, she pointed out that it bore a date that was nine months old, October 1937. It must have been mislaid in all the red tape of the interrogators and murderers, the intellectuals with round eyeglasses and exquisite ideas about literature and the need to purify the Revolution with blood. Or maybe someone had deliberately kept it in a desk drawer, examining it day after day at an office desk the way you study a valuable manuscript, in an office with the noise of typewriters and heavy doors and locks. Someone decided to prolong for a year the day-and-night torture of the German woman who went from jail to jail in Moscow, vainly seeking news of her husband, and who kept a suitcase in her small, icy room, packed with a few things she needed for the moment she was arrested and shipped to Siberia. She never learned how or when Heinz Neumann died. With a letter and a packet of food under her arm, she went to Moscow in the midst of the tumultuous preparations for May Day, keeping away from the crowd as if she had the plague or leprosy, a foreign woman who didn’t speak Russian well and who couldn’t trust anyone, because her former comrades were either arrested or dead or had turned their backs on her. A figure among the throngs, not wanting to see the red flags or the posters strung above the streets or hear the music thundering over the loudspeakers, the heroic march from Aida, she recalled years later, and Strauss waltzes. On April 30, 1937, Greta Buber-Neumann walks to Lubyanka Prison, hoping to find her husband, who was arrested three days before, and everywhere she sees portraits of Stalin, in the shopwindows, on the fronts of houses, on movie theater doors, portraits encircled with flower garlands or red flags bearing the hammer and sickle. When she passes a group of people who have stopped to watch as workmen with pulleys and ropes raise an enormous portrait of Stalin that covers the entire front of a building, Greta turns away and presses harder against her belly the package of food and clothing that she may never be able to deliver. If only I could never see that face again. In the Opera House square they have just raised a wooden statue of Stalin—more than ten met
ers tall and mounted on a pedestal encircled with red flags: Stalin, walking energetically in a soldier’s greatcoat and cap. What would you do if you were that woman lost in a vast foreign and hostile city, if they had taken away your passport and the temporary ID that classified you as an official of the Comintern, if they had thrown you out of your job and were about to throw you out of the room you shared with your husband, a room you still hadn’t straightened after the search, still hadn’t made the bed where you spent your last night with him, not sleeping for a minute, still hadn’t picked up the books they threw on the floor and then stomped on or the stuffing from the mattress they expertly gutted looking for hidden documents, weapons, proof? You wait in the room, sitting on the unmade bed, stupefied, hearing steps in the hotel corridor, watching as the gray light of the afternoon slips toward darkness. They will come for you too, and you even wish they would hurry, you have your suitcase packed, or the bundle you will take with you, but days go by, weeks, months, and nothing happens, except that you’ve become invisible, no one looks you in the eye, and when you stand in line in the police stations and prisons beside the relatives of other prisoners and your turn comes, they rudely close the little window in your face because it’s late. They won’t tell you whether or not your husband is locked up in there, or pretend they don’t understand the words you speak in Russian, words you have prepared so carefully, repeating them as you walk down the street like a crazy woman talking to herself. Ever since the Germans entered Prague, Milena Jesenska knew that sooner or later they would come looking for her, but she didn’t hide, didn’t stop writing in newspapers, she only took a few precautions; she sent her ten-year-old daughter to spend a while with friends, and she asked someone in whom she had absolute faith, the writer Willy Haas, to keep for her the letters from Franz Kafka.