Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  If the details are lost, the easy thing is to invent them, falsify them, profane what was a painful part of another human being’s experience by claiming it as your own. On a train in Asturias, on the way to a writers’ conference, to while away the time of the journey, or for the simple vanity of telling with appropriate irony something that doesn’t matter to you at all, or to anyone listening, the writer who has spoken Señor Salama’s name aloud, although he can’t remember whether it was Isaac or Jacob or Jeremiah or Isaiah, begins a story that will last only a few minutes, but he doesn’t know that he is compounding an affront, aggravating an insult.

  Isaac Salama boards a train bound for Casablanca, where he’s going for reasons of business. He’s in his forties and for several years, since his father’s retirement, has been managing the Galerías Duna, which is going downhill, like those large department stores in Spanish provincial capitals that were fashionable at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, but after that seemed to be frozen in time like archaeological relics. When he travels by train, Señor Salama likes to be at the station early, that way he can take his seat before the other travelers and avoid having them watch him—so clumsy, so exhausted-looking—struggling along on his two crutches. He tucks them beneath his seat or stows them unobtrusively in the overhead net for the luggage, if possible behind his suitcase, although not without first calculating what moves he must make to recover them without difficulty, and leaving the things he will need during the trip well within reach. He also tries to wear a lightweight raincoat and throw that across his legs. This is during the time when trains still had small compartments with facing seats. If someone takes a seat next to his, Señor Salama will sit the entire trip without getting up, hoping the other person will get off before he does, and only in an extreme case will he rise and collect his crutches to go to the lavatory, braving the risk that people will see him in the corridor, step aside and watch him with pity or derision, or offer to help him, hold a door for him or hold out a hand.

  It is almost time for the train to leave, and, to Señor Salama’s pleasure, no one has come into his compartment. Which is frequently the case when he travels in first class. Just as the train has begun to move, a woman bursts in, perhaps agitated because she had to run to catch it at the last minute. She takes the seat facing Señor Salama, who pulls up his inert legs beneath the raincoat. He has never married, in fact he has scarcely dared look at a woman since he was injured, as embarrassed by his stigmatizing plight as he was as a boy obliged to wear a yellow star on the lapel of his jacket.

  The woman is young, very pretty, cultivated, clearly Spanish. Despite his reticence, in only a short while after beginning the trip they are chatting as if they had known each other forever, because the woman has the gift of expressing herself clearly and easily, but also of listening with flattering attention to what is said to her, and then, without prying, asking further details. Without realizing it, they lean toward each other, and it may be that their hands brush as they gesture, or their knees—hers naked, bare of stockings, his pulled back and hidden beneath his raincoat. As they speak, their heads, profiled against the window, never turn to observe the rapidly passing countryside. Señor Salama is strongly attracted to her but also shivering with tenderness, the physical promise of happiness that he believes he sees reflected and returned in the woman’s eyes.

  Both wish that the journey would last forever: the pleasure of being on the train, of having met, of having so many hours of conversation before them, and of discovering mutual affinities never shared with anyone until then. Señor Salama, whom the accident has left arrested in the tormented timidity of adolescence, finds an ease of conversing he never knew he had, a hint of seductiveness and audacity that after all these years restores the fun-loving impulses of his first days in Madrid.

  She tells him she is traveling to Casablanca, where she lives with her family. He is about to tell her that he’s going there too and they can get off together and make plans to see each other during the next few days. Then he remembers what he has put out of his mind for the last few hours, his obsession and his embarrassment, and he says nothing, or he lies, he says what a pity, he must go on to Rabat. If he gets off at Casablanca, he will have to use his crutches, which she hasn’t seen, just as she hasn’t seen his legs, although she’s brushed against them, because they are covered by the raincoat.

  They keep talking, but now there are occasional periods of silence and both realize it, and although she tries hard to fill them there is already a pool of shadow, of curiosity or suspicion, behind her words. Maybe she thinks she’s done something wrong, said something she shouldn’t have. In the meantime Señor Salama looks out the window every time the train comes to a station and calculates how many stops are left before Casablanca, before the inevitable farewell. He berates himself with secret rage, sets himself periods of time in which to express his feelings, postpones them, and all the while she is talking and smiling, her eloquent hands brushing his, her knees so close that they bump his when the train brakes, and then he surreptitiously adjusts the raincoat over his thighs so it won’t slip to the floor. He will tell her that he too is going to Casablanca, he will pull himself up in the seat as soon as the train has stopped and take down his crutches, he won’t let her try to help carry his luggage, because after so many years he’s acquired an agility and strength in his arms and torso that he never imagined having, and when he doesn’t have enough hands, he holds something with his teeth, or catches his balance by leaning against a wall.

  But deep down he knows and has never doubted for an instant that he won’t do that. As the train gets closer to Casablanca, the woman writes her address and telephone number for him and asks for his, which Señor Salama scrawls illegibly on a scrap of paper. The train has stopped, and the woman, standing before him, pauses for a minute, confused, surprised that he doesn’t get to his feet to say good-bye, that he doesn’t help her get down her suitcase. She probably hasn’t seen the crutches hidden behind his bag, although it is also tempting to imagine that she did see them, with a woman’s keen perceptiveness, and also noticed something strange about the legs placed so close together and covered by the raincoat. She decides not to bend down and kiss Señor Salama goodbye, instead she holds out her hand and smiles, and the shrug of her shoulders expresses fatalism, or capitulation, and she asks him to call her if he decides to stop in Casablanca on the return trip, and says that she will call him the next time she goes to Tangiers. At the last instant, he is tempted to stand up, or not to release her hand but allow her to help him up with her strong grip. The impulse is so strong that it almost seems he has enough strength in his legs to stand up without help from anyone. But he sits quietly, and, after a moment’s hesitation, the woman releases his hand, picks up her suitcase, turns toward him for the last time, and goes out into the corridor. Once she’s on the platform, he can’t see her anymore. He leans back in the seat when the train starts off toward a city where he has nothing to do, where he will have to look for a hotel to spend the night, a hotel near the station because he will have to take the first train back to Casablanca. Oh you, whom I would have loved, he recited that evening in his office in the Ateneo Español, moved as deeply as if he were chanting the Kaddish in his father’s memory, the sound of a ship’s horn and the music of a muezzin’s call came through the open window. Oh you, who knew so well.

  münzenberg

  I SIT UP UNTIL VERY LATE, fighting back sleep in order to read a little more, to learn more about the life of this man I had never heard of before yesterday, Willi Münzenberg, who at the beginning of the summer of 1940 is fleeing west along the roads of France in the great flood of people occasioned by the advance of German armored cars. Now that he is seeing things quietly and with clarity for the first time in the fifty years of his life, and has acquired enough experience and courage to do openly the things he should, nothing matters and there isn’t enough time. This isn’t the first time he’s fled, but it is the first time he�
��s fled on foot, with no resources and without a place to go, knowing that on whichever side of the front lines he tries to find refuge there will be people ready to betray him and turn him in, if he isn’t machine-gunned—unknown and unidentified—among a line of hostages chosen at random, or blown up by a bomb or mine. He will be executed if the Germans capture him, but he will also die if his former comrades and Communist subordinates come across his trail. If he tries to reach England, a nearly impossible proposition, he knows that there too he will be arrested as a spy, and that surely the English will use him as a pawn in an exchange with the Soviets or the Germans. He had everything, and now he has and is nothing, although someone says, no, he had two thousand francs in his pocket, which he planned to use to buy a car and escape to Switzerland.

  He knows that even the little that’s left of him, this fleeting shadow on the roads of France, is unacceptable to many, an irrelevant or harmful witness whom it would be very good to eliminate. What he thought to be his strength, his life insurance, is actually the reason for his sentence. He knows something more: in the English secret services there are Soviet moles who will send news of his presence in England to Moscow, so that he won’t be safe there even if the British government offers him asylum.

  MY EYES CLOSE, the book nearly slips from my hands, as Münzenberg walks on among the throngs that flood the highways and scatter into nearby fields like a swarm of insects every time the low-flying German fighter planes swoop down over them. First comes the sound of engines in the distance, then the metallic silhouettes glinting in the June sunlight, and finally their shadows, huge raptors with fixed, widespread wings, machine-gunning a convoy of retreating military vehicles, dropping bombs on a bridge where escaping soldiers are clustered around a broken-down truck. Scurrying insects are what the pilots see from the air: tiny figures, oblique black scrawls. But each of those little creatures is a human being, having a name, a life, a face unlike that of any other person. Münzenberg is trying to blend in, to be a nobody and escape the claws and gullet of the cyclops. But the eye of the cyclops he knows best and fears most, Joseph Stalin, sees everything, scrutinizes everything, will not allow anyone to save himself. Not even by shrinking to the size of the most insignificant insect can a marked man escape his hunters, not even in a fortress in Mexico protected by high walls, barbed wire, armed guards, lookout towers, and iron gates, could Trotsky escape a pursuit that lasted more than ten years and encompassed the entire world.

  Who among the masses fleeing around him could imagine Willi Münzenberg’s story? A corpulent foreigner, badly dressed and unshaven, who has spent the last few months in a concentration camp, one of those camps in which the French government is incarcerating the refugees and stateless persons who according to the criminal logic of the times have most to fear from the Nazis: if war breaks out against Germany, the German refugees living in France become the enemy, so they must be locked up even though it is the Nazi regime they want to escape. Once imprisoned, they are perfect prey for the German army and the Gestapo they believed they eluded when they fled to France. In 1933 this man, Willi Münzenberg, came to Paris with the first wave of fugitives from Nazi persecution after the fire in the Reichstag, where he had held a seat as a Communist deputy. That time he escaped in a large black Lincoln Continental driven by his chauffeur, not on foot, like now, when he has nothing and is nobody, when he doesn’t know where his wife is or if she’s alive or if he will see her again. Both of them are caught in the chaos of the war, she too a tiny figure among the fleeing multitudes, in the uncountable census of the displaced and deported, the millions of people forced onto the highways of a Europe suddenly thrown back into barbarity. Crowds wait on train platforms, on the docks of seaside cities, line up on sidewalks outside the closed doors of foreign legations to get the passports, papers, visas, and administrative seals that can stamp on their destinies the difference between life and death.

  I HAVE PUT THE BOOK on the night table and turned off the light, and as I lie here with my eyes open in the darkness, the sleep that only moments before was sweeping over me now evaporates. I’ve missed falling asleep the way you miss a train, by a minute, by seconds, and I know that I will have to wait for it to return and that it may be hours before it comes. The last time Münzenberg was seen alive was at a table in the town café, sitting with two men much younger than he and speaking with them in German. It’s possible that they too were fugitives from the camp, and that one of them killed him; maybe they’d been sent to the camp as prisoners to win the confidence of the man they’d been ordered to shoot.

  I lie quietly in the dark, listening to your breathing. Münzenberg flees in advance of the German army, accompanied by two men, and he doesn’t know they are Soviet agents who have been watching him ever since they arrived in the camp as prisoners, with others whose executions have been assigned to them. Or maybe he knows but doesn’t have the strength to escape, to keep pushing on in an exhausting and futile flight, the dragging out of a hunt that has lasted several years. Past the balcony, across the rooftops, I see the great face of the clock in the Telephone Building, which from this distance suggests a Moscow skyscraper, maybe because it isn’t difficult to imagine that the red light at the pinnacle is a huge Communist star. Years ago, before I ever went to New York, I saw in my dreams an enormous building of black brick with a large red star at its pyramid-shaped peak, and someone beside me, someone I couldn’t see, pointed and said, “That’s the Bronx star.”

  When I can’t sleep, the ghosts of the dead return, the ghosts of the living as well, people I haven’t seen or thought of in a long time, events, actions, names from earlier lives, laced not with nostalgia, but rather with regret or shame. Fear returns too, a childish fear of the dark, of shadows or shapes that take on the form of an animal or a human presence or of a door about to open. In the winter of 1936, in a hotel room in Moscow, Willi Münzenberg lay awake and perhaps was smoking in the dark as his wife slept by his side, and every time he heard footsteps in the corridor outside their room, he thought with a shudder of clearsighted panic, “They’ve come, they’re here.” Out the window he saw a red star, or a clock with numbers in red, glowing at the pinnacle of a building above the vast darkness of Moscow, above the streets where nothing was moving at that hour but the black vans of the KGB.

  My grandmother Leonor—may she rest in peace—whom I can scarcely remember now, told me when I was a boy that her mother appeared to her every night after she died. She didn’t do anything, didn’t say anything, didn’t evoke fear, only melancholy and tenderness and a sense of guilt, although my grandmother never used that word, guilt wasn’t part of her country vocabulary. Her mother would look at her in silence, smile so she wouldn’t be afraid, make a movement of her head as if to point to something, ask for something, and then she disappeared, or my grandmother would fall asleep, and the next night she would wake and see her again, motionless and faithful, at the foot of the bed, which is the same bed you and I are sleeping in now.

  “Mama, what do you want? Do you need something?” my grandmother would ask her, as solicitous as when her mother was alive and very ill and would stare at her without speaking, her face pale against the pillow and her eyes following her daughter around the room.

  The ghost repeated this nightly gesture, like someone who wants to say something but has lost the use of her voice. One Sunday morning in church, my grandmother realized what it was her mother wanted to say. She was so poor, and had so many children, she hadn’t been able to pay for masses for her mother, and although she wasn’t a dedicated believer her remorse wouldn’t leave her in peace; a mute uneasiness developed that she shared with no one. Without the masses maybe her mother hadn’t been able to get out of purgatory. My grandmother managed to scrape a little money together by borrowing from a sister-in-law, and with the coins and worn five-peseta bills wrapped in a handkerchief she went to the Church of Santa María to schedule the masses. That night, when her mother visited, standing by the bars of the
brass footboard, my grandmother told her not to worry, soon she would have what she needed. Her mother never came again, there was never another “visitation,” as my grandmother said in her language from another century. She felt relieved, but also sad, because now she would never see her mother again, not even in dreams.

  The bed you and I are sleeping in now is the one my mother was born in. My parents were surprised that we wanted to bring this cumbersome old bed back to Madrid with us after all the years it sat in the attic. It was against those same bars I can see outlined in the dark, now that my eyes have adjusted, that my grandmother’s mother rested her pale hand, my great-grandmother, from whom some part of me comes and whose name I don’t even know, although I must have inherited from her some of my face, or character, or erratic health. How strange to live in places where the dead have lived, to use things that belonged to them, to look in mirrors where their faces were reflected, to look at oneself with eyes that may have the shape or color of theirs. The dead return during the sleepless hours, people I have forgotten and people I never knew, all prodding the memory of one who survived a war sixty years ago, telling him not to forget them, to speak their names aloud and tell how they lived, why they were carried off so early by a death that could have claimed him. Whose place in life have I taken? Whose destiny was canceled so that mine could be fulfilled? Why was I chosen and not another?