YOUR ARMS ARE AROUND ME, hugging me tight, as you do when you’re asleep and have a bad dream, you snuggle your icy feet between mine, shivering from the same cold you felt as a little girl, an ancient cold of long winters and houses without heat, cold retained in the rooms of this house as faithfully as the photos of the dead, as the most vivid memories older than reason but already brushed by melancholy and the inkling of inevitable loss: a child’s sudden fear of growing up, the cruel knowledge, which comes from nowhere, that your parents will grow old and die. Also the fear that clutched you in its pincers those nights after your mother’s death, when you didn’t dare go from your bedroom to the bathroom lest you see her in the shadowy hallway in her nightgown, her hair all wild, the way she looked when you came home and were there only a few days before she had to go back to the hospital. You closed your eyes and feared that when you opened them she would be standing at the foot of your bed, asking you something wordlessly, and if you felt you were falling asleep you feared that she would appear in a dream, and you would jerk awake with anguish, thinking you heard the sound of doors opening, or footsteps, and again you felt the raw pain of her death and of being so alone, and shamefully afraid she would come back as a ghost.
FROM BELOW COME THE sounds of conversations and footsteps, a car starting, a telephone ringing, male voices issuing instructions, large objects being shoved around or set down. They’re moving furniture to make room for the coffin. But you don’t want to give in to that thought, you resist imagining the face of your dead aunt, ravaged not only by cancer but also by the old age your mother never knew, a delicate woman young forever because the images you have of the time she was ill are nearly erased and because you happen to have no photographs from her last years. That’s how I see her too, assiduous spy that I am, researcher of your memory, which I want to be as much mine as your present life is. I can’t imagine the woman your mother would be now had she not died: seventy-some years, heavyset, probably with dyed hair. I see her as you do, as you sometimes dream of her, a young woman who still has the smile of a girl, the shadow of which I sometimes intuit on your lips, just as I can see her gaze in your eyes, and that from her—like a ring spreading on the surface of time—comes your inclination to melancholy, your way of building illusions about anything new, the care with which you arrange the objects around you, your devotion to this house in which you and she both were girls, to this oasis with the desertlike hills in the background, this place where she wanted to rest forever and be with her own, with those who gradually have been joining her in the small cemetery with the earthen walls: first her niece, who died even younger than your mother, forever safe from time in the photograph on the television, and tonight her sister, another name added to the tablet in the family pantheon, which you will see tomorrow morning during the burial, and think—maybe for the first time, and without my knowing, without your wanting to say it to me—“When I die, I want you to bury me with them.”
oh you, who knew so well
THEY DISAPPEAR ONE DAY, they are lost, erased forever, as if they had died, as if they had died so many years ago that they are no longer in anyone’s memory and there is no sign they were ever in this world. Someone comes along, suddenly enters your life, is part of it for a few hours, a day, the duration of a journey, becomes a presence so insistent that it’s difficult to recall a time he wasn’t there. Whatever exists, even for an hour or two, seems permanent. In Tangiers, in the dark office of a cloth merchant, in a Madrid restaurant, in the dining car of a train, one man tells another fragments from the novel of his life, and the hours of the telling and of the conversation seem to contain more time than will fit within ordinary hours: someone speaks, someone listens, and for each the other’s voice and face take on the familiarity of a person he has always known. Yet an hour or day later, he isn’t there, will never be there, not because he died, although he might have, and his presence for those to whom he was so close dissolves into nothing. For fourteen years, beginning July 30, 1908, Franz Kafka punctually went to his office in the Society for Prevention of Workplace Accidents in Prague, and then one day in the summer of 1922 he left at the customary hour and never returned, because of illness. His disappearance was as inconspicuous as the way he had sat for so many years at his neat desk, where in one of his locked drawers he kept the letters Milena Jesenska wrote him. For some time afterward an old overcoat that he kept there for rainy days hung in the closet, then it too disappeared, and with it the peculiar odor that had identified his presence in the office for fourteen years.
The most stable things vanish, the worst and the best, the most trivial along with those that were necessary and decisive: the years one spends in a dismal office or endures remorsefully indifferent and distant in a marriage, or the memory of a journey to a city where one had either lived or promised oneself to return to after a unique and memorable visit. Love, suffering, even some of the greatest hells on Earth are erased after one or two generations, and a day comes when there is not one living witness who can remember.
In Tangiers, Señor Salama told of going to Poland to visit the camp where the gas chambers swallowed up his mother and two sisters, and of having found nothing but a large clearing in a forest and a sign bearing the name of an abandoned railway station, and of how the horror of the fact that there were now no visible traces of the camp was somehow contained in that name, in the rusty iron sign swinging above a platform beyond which there was nothing but the sweep of the clearing and gigantic pines against a low gray sky from which a silent rain was falling, rain scarcely visible in the fog but dripping from the roof of a shed at the station. It was a camp so unimportant that almost no one knew its name, said Señor Salama, and he pronounced a difficult word that must have been Polish—but then the name Auschwitz hadn’t meant anything to Primo Levi either the first time he saw it written on the sign of a railway station. In a place like that, far from the principal camps, it was easier for deportees to be lost, for their names to disappear from those detailed records the Germans always kept. With that same fanatic administrative zeal they organized the transporting of hundreds of thousands of captives by rail in the midst of the Allied bombings and military disasters of the last months of the war.
Railroad tracks were just visible in the wet grass, rusted rails and rotted ties, and one of Señor Salama’s crutches snagged or got tangled in them, and he nearly fell, fat and clumsy and humiliated, onto the same soil where his mother and two sisters perished, over which they’d walked when they reached the camp and got down from the train that had carried them like animals to the slaughterhouse: three familiar faces and names in an abstract mass of unknown victims. The guide steadied him, the survivor who had driven him here in an old car, and pointed out the now barely visible outlines of walls, the rectangles of cement on which the barracks had stood, a low line of bricks that someone who didn’t know the place well wouldn’t have noticed, it was all that remained of the courtyard where the crematory ovens had been, because the Germans had blown up the buildings at the last moment, after the sky had been red every night for weeks on the eastern horizon and the earth trembled with reverberations from the ever closer Russian artillery. Tens of thousands of human beings killed there over four or five years, unloaded onto this platform from cattle cars and lined up on the cement platforms, with orders barked in German or Polish and cries of pain and desperation, echoes of screams and commands lost in the enormous thicket of conifers, military marches and waltzes played by a spectral orchestra of prisoners . . . and of all that, nothing was left but a clearing in a forest drenched by a wet mist, and the fog wiping out the view, the places the prisoners would have seen every day through the barbed wire, knowing they would never walk in the outside world again, excluded from the number of the living as if they were already dead.
That skinny, evasive, servile man who accompanied Señor Salama to the site of the camp, what could he have experienced to make him choose this strange duty of acting as guardian and guide of th
e hell he had survived yet still did not want to leave? Guardian of a large deserted area in the middle of the woods and of a platform that now had no connection with any railroad; an archaeologist of blackened brick and slowly rusting hinges and oven doors; a seeker of remains, testimonies, relics, the metal bowls and spoons the prisoners used to eat their soup; a guide through traces of ruins increasingly overgrown and erased by the simple passage of time or sometimes enhanced by the white winter snows. When he died or was too old or tired to accompany the rare traveler who came to visit that unimportant camp, when he was no longer there to point out the sooty brick wall or line of cement platforms or peculiar undulation beneath the unbroken snow, no one would notice those minor irregularities in the forest clearing, or realize that the metallic crunch beneath their boots came from a spoon that once was the most valuable treasure in a man’s life, and no one would guess the atrocious significance of a few piles of burned brick or, lying in the grass, a post to which a curl of barbed wire was still attached.
THEY DISAPPEAR, left behind by time, and distance falsifies memory as gradually as the rain. The years, abandon, and deteriorating materials all obliterate the ruins of a German death camp lost in the woods on the boundary between Poland and Lithuania, meticulously burned and destroyed by its guards on the eve of the arrival of the Red Army, which found only cinders, debris, and hastily filled-in ditches where countless layers of human bodies were piled, preserved by the cold, clustered and tangled, naked, skeletal, frozen limb to limb, tens of thousands of nameless bodies among whom were Señor Isaac Salama’s four grandparents and most of his aunts and uncles and cousins, along with his mother and two sisters, who weren’t saved as he and his father were, because the passports came too late for them in the summer of 1944, issued by the Spanish legation in Hungary, acknowledging the Spanish nationality of the Sephardic families living in Budapest.
“Our neighbors, my friends from school, my father’s colleagues—they took all of them,” said Señor Salama. “We wouldn’t go out of the house for fear they would pick us up in the street before the papers the Spanish diplomat had promised us arrived. We heard on the radio that the Allies had taken Paris and that to the east the Russians had crossed the border with Hungary, but it seemed as if the only thing that mattered to the Germans was exterminating all of us. Imagine the enterprise required to transport all those people by train across half of Europe in the middle of a war they were about to lose. They chose to use the trains to send us to the camps over sending their troops to the front. They went into Hungary in March—March 14, I will never forget, although for many years I didn’t remember that date, I didn’t remember anything. They came in March and had deported half a million people by summer, but since they were afraid that the Russians would come too soon and not leave enough time for them to send all the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in an orderly fashion, they shot many of them in the head right in the street and threw their bodies into the Danube, the work of the Germans and their Hungarian friends. The men of the Cross Arrow, they were called; they wore black uniforms that copied the SS and were even more bloody than the Germans, if much less systematic.”
You live all the days of your life in the house you were born in, a haven where you always had the warm protection of your parents and your two older sisters, and you expect to have that forever, just as you expect to have the photographs and paintings on the walls, and the toys and books in your bedroom. Then one day, in a few hours’ time, all that disappears forever, without a trace, because you went out to do one of your usual chores, and when you came back, you were prevented from going in by an uncrossable chasm of time. “My father and I had gone to look for something to eat,” said Señor Salama. “And when we returned, the concierge’s husband, who had a good heart, came out and warned us to go away because the soldiers who had taken our family might come back. My father had a package in his hand, maybe one of those little packets of candy he brought home every Sunday, and it fell to the ground at his feet. That I remember. I picked up the package and took my father’s hand, which was ice cold. ‘Go away, far away,’ the concierge’s husband told us, and quickly walked off, looking from side to side, fearing that someone might have seen him talking to two Jews as if he were their friend. We walked for a long time without exchanging a word, I clinging to my father’s hand, which no longer warmed mine or had the strength to lead me. I led him, keeping an eye out for patrols of Germans or Hungarian Nazis. We went into a café near the Spanish legation, and my father made a telephone call. He fumbled through his pockets for a coin, but he kept getting tangled up in his handkerchief and his billfold and his pocket watch. I remember that too. I had to give him the coin to buy the token. The man came whom my father had visited before, and he told my father that everything was arranged, but my father didn’t say anything, didn’t answer, it was as if he didn’t hear, and the man asked him if he was ill. My father’s chin had sunk to his chest, and his eyes were empty, the expression he would wear till he died. I told the man that they had taken our whole family, I wanted to cry but the tears didn’t come, and a suffocating heaviness gripped my chest. Finally the tears burst out, and I think that the people at the nearby tables stared at me, but I didn’t care; I threw myself at the man, clutching the lapels of his overcoat and begging him to help my family, but maybe he didn’t understand because I spoke in Hungarian and with my father he’d been speaking French. We were driven in a large black car bearing the flag of the diplomatic legation to a house where there were a lot of other people. I remember small rooms and suitcases, men wearing overcoats and hats, women in kerchiefs, people speaking in low voices and sleeping in the corridors, on the floor, using bundles of clothing as pillows. My father was always wide-awake, smoking, trying to make a telephone call, from time to time badgering the employees of the Spanish legation to bring us something to eat. We searched for the names of my mother and sisters on the list of deportees, but they didn’t appear. Later we learned—that is, my father learned years later—that they hadn’t been taken to the same camps nearly everyone else was sent to, to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. The Spanish diplomat who saved the lives of so many of us was able to rescue some Jews even from those camps, endangering his own life, acting behind the backs of his superiors in the ministry, driving from one end of Budapest to the other at all hours of the day or night in the same black embassy car he’d taken us in, picking up people in hiding or those who’d just been arrested. If they didn’t have authentic Sephardic blood, he invented identities and papers for them, even relatives and businesses in Spain. Sanz-Briz, his name was. He located many people and managed to have some sent back from the camps, he snatched them from hell, but of my mother and sisters there was no trace, because they’d been taken to that camp no one had ever heard of, and of which nothing remains except the roof and the sign I saw five years ago. I would never have chosen to go. I can’t bear to set foot in that part of Europe, I can’t bear the idea of standing and looking at a person of a certain age in a café or on a street in Germany or Poland or Hungary; I wonder what they were doing during those years, what they saw, whom they’d sided with. But shortly before my father died he asked me to visit the camp, and I promised I would. And do you know what’s there? Nothing. A clearing in a forest. The roof of a railway station and a rusted sign.”
I wonder what happened to Señor Salama, who in the middle 1980s was the director of the Ateneo Español, the Spanish cultural center in Tangiers, working in a small office decorated with once brightly colored tourist posters now crumpled and faded by time and with old furniture in fake Spanish style; he also managed, grudgingly, the Galerías Duna on Louis Pasteur Boulevard, a fabric shop established by his father that took its name from a river in that other country that they, unlike most he knew, had managed to escape from, unlike the sisters and mother they didn’t even have a photograph of, nothing to use as a crutch for memory, as material proof that would have helped against the erosion of memory.
Duna is the Hungari
an name for the Danube River. Señor Salama, with his rich vocabulary and strange accent punctuated with dim tonalities, musical embers of the Jewish Spanish he’d heard spoken in his childhood and the few lullabies he still remembered, with his laborious way of pulling himself along on two crutches and with his eyes that watered so easily, his sparse gray hair, his forehead always gleaming with sweat he constantly dabbed at with a white handkerchief embroidered with his initials, with his breath ragged from the effort of moving a large clumsy body whose legs no longer served it, bone-thin legs beneath the cloth of his trousers, two appendages swinging beneath the weight of a large belly and thick torso. But he insisted on doing everything for himself, without help from anyone; lurching skillfully along, breathing rapidly, he would open doors and turn on lights and explain the small treasures and souvenirs of the Ateneo Español, framed photographs of a famous visitor many years ago, or of performances of plays by Benavente and Casona, even Lorca, a diploma issued by the Ministry of Information and Tourism, a book dedicated to the center’s library by a writer whose fame had been fading with the years, until even his name was no longer familiar—though you had to hide that from Señor Salama, you had to tell him that you’d read the book and that his inscribed first edition must be very valuable by now. Awkward, expert, chaotic, tireless despite his difficulty breathing and his crutches, he would point out old posters announcing conferences and plays in the Ateneo’s small theater, and even in the large Teatro Cervantes, which now, he says, is a shameful ruin infested with rats, invaded by delinquents, a jewel of Spanish architecture the government pays no attention to at all. They don’t want to know anything of what little is left of Spain in Tangiers, they don’t answer the letters that Señor Salama writes to the ministries of Culture and Education and External Affairs. He sets the posters to one side, looks through the papers on his desk, and pulls out a folder stuffed with carbon copies bearing the stamp of the main post office, clear proof that they’ve been sent, though never answered. He points out dates, quickly thumbs through papers—from a petition to a document dated several years before—all written on a typewriter, in the old-fashioned way before the age of word processors and photocopiers, always with several carbon copies. The stage of the Ateneo Español was the setting for the first theater company of Tangiers, although, he explains, “it is composed of amateurs who don’t get a peseta for it, including me—who can’t act, as you may imagine, but I often direct.” Along the walls of a corridor, he points out poorly framed black-and-white photographs in which the actors hold exaggerated, theatrical poses, enthusiastic amateurs declaiming in front of modest sets of the inn in Don Juan Tenorio, the stairway of a tenement in Madrid, the walls of an Andalusian village. “We’ve done Benavente and Casona, and every year on the first of November we perform the Don Juan play, but don’t judge us too quickly, because we also presented The House of Bernarda Alba long before it made its debut in Spain, when the only person to have performed it was Margarita Xirgu in Montevideo.”
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