Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Münzenberg quickly pledges his loyalty, of course, but in spite of how perceptive he is about character and weakness he fails to detect the edge of resentment beneath Katz’s suaveness, or the meticulous patience with which Katz secretly collects small IOUs for the insults he suffers or imagines, the humiliation that Münzenberg’s uncontrolled and baroque energy has inflicted through the years. Koestler writes that Katz was dark and distinguished, attractive in a slightly sordid way. He spoke and wrote fluently in French, English, German, Russian, and Czech. He had discussed literature with Milena Jensenska in the cafés of Prague and Vienna. He always squinted one eye when he lit his cigarettes or was absorbed in something. During the Spanish Civil War, he directed the official news agency of the Republican government, which entrusted him with secret funds allocated to influence certain French publications and politicians. Münzenberg rescued him from poverty and despair in Berlin, where at the beginning of the 1920s Katz was frequenting the haunts of beggars and drunks and loitering near bridges favored by suicides. In 1938, when Münzenberg was expelled from the German Communist Party, accused of secretly working for the Gestapo, Katz was one of the first to repudiate him publicly and call him a traitor.

  That rat Otto Katz gave him the Judas kiss, plotted his death, even if he didn’t personally tighten the noose around his neck.

  Many years later, an ancient woman of ninety speaks into a microphone in the dusk of an apartment in Munich. Age has erased the haughtiness from her face but not her imperious bearing or the glitter in her eyes, just as time has not calmed her scorn for that long-ago traitor, who also was eventually expelled and condemned, executed in 1952 in a cell in Prague with a rope around his neck. There was no mercy for executioners either, it seems. “Otto Katz!” says the old woman, pronouncing that name as if spitting it through her tightly pressed lips painted with a ragged streak of crimson.

  I also track this woman through literature, seek her face in photographs, browse the labyrinths of the Internet, hoping to find the book she wrote in the 1940s to vindicate her husband’s memory and denounce and shame those who plotted his death. I see scenes, images not invoked by will or based on any recollection but endowed with a somnambulist precision in which imagination does not intervene: curtains drawn in the Munich apartment, in October 1989, the tape whirring with a slight hiss in the small recorder before her, an archive where her voice will be preserved, a voice I never heard, it came to me through the soundless words of a book discovered by chance and read voraciously during a sleepless night.

  For two or three years I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theater. That these stills were never in narrative sequence made them all the more powerful, freed them of the weight and vulgar conventions of a scenario; they were revelations in the present, with no before or after. When I didn’t have the money to go inside, I would spend hours looking at the photographs outside the theater, not needing to invent a story to fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole.

  The creaking of the parquet floor in our new house, or a bad dream about illness or misfortune, woke me suddenly, and I was Willi Münzenberg waking in the middle of the night in his house in Paris or in the icy room of a Moscow hotel, fearing that his executioners were approaching, wondering how long it would be before a shot or knife brought an end to the great illusion and delirium of his public existence, and the long tenderness of his married life with Babette, who lay sleeping at his side, hugging him in her sleep the way you hug me, with the determination of a sleepwalker.

  The local train stops at the small station of La Sierra de Madrid: drizzle, hillsides covered with trees and fog, the strong scent of wet vegetation—rockrose, pines, cedars—and steep slate rooftops give the impression that you have traveled much farther, to a hidden mountain retreat where there might be sanatoriums or homes for patients in need of rest and cold, clean air. The train is rapid and modern, but the station building is bare stone and the windows are set in red brick, and the sign with the name of the town is written on yellow tiles. There’s no one on the platform, and no one else has stepped off the train. A scent of forests, of drenched trees and earth, floods my lungs, and the touch of the still, misty air on my face gives me an immediate sense of calm. The train pulls away, and I begin walking along a dirt road, suitcase in hand, toward some farms where lights are just going on. In 1937, fearing for his life, so agitated and exhausted that at times he felt a sharp pain in his chest, the warning of a heart attack, Münzenberg hid for a few months in a clinic in a place called La Vallée des Loups, the valley of the wolves. The name of the director also seemed an indication or promise of something: Dr. Le Sapoureux. But Münzenberg is as ill suited for physical repose as he is for intellectual calm, and the minute he arrives at the clinic he starts spending his nights writing a book. As I step onto the platform of the small train station of La Sierra, alone, I am Willi Münzenberg looking in the dark for the road to the sanatorium.

  We have come on a winter afternoon to a hotel in the north, in Vitoria. They have given us a room on the top floor, and when I open the window I see a snow-covered park with little squares and statues and a bandstand and, in the background, above the white rooftops, a gray sky stretching like a receding plain. Münzenberg and Babette succeeded in getting out of Russia, and after a long night on the train they found lodging in a hotel near the station of a Baltic city, still worn out from lack of sleep and the tension of approaching the border, fearful that at the last moment the Soviet guards who inspected their passports would order them off the train.

  I walk through Madrid or Paris, and a passing metro train makes the pavement tremble beneath my feet: Münzenberg feels that the world is trembling beneath his feet, that no one but he sees the disaster coming, no one on the terraces of the cafés or walking under the bright lights of the boulevards, as the ground begins to shake beneath marching boots and the weight of armored cars, beneath the bombs falling in Madrid and Barcelona and Guernica that no one in Europe wants to hear, and all the while Hitler is preparing his armies and consulting his maps and Stalin is concocting the great public theater of the Moscow trials and the secret hells of interrogation and execution.

  I attend a performance of The Magic Flute, and for no reason, in the middle of the verve and joy of the music, the man sitting beside a blond woman is Münzenberg, and the flight of the hero lost in a forest and chased by dragons and faceless conspirators is also his light. Maybe he slipped into Germany, and although he doesn’t like opera came to this performance of The Magic Flute in a Berlin theater filled with black and gray uniforms to make contact with someone. But that scenario isn’t realistic; Münzenberg could have come into Germany incognito, but in the Berlin opera Babette would have been recognized immediately, the Red bourgeoise, the scandalous and arrogant deserter of her social class, of the great Aryan nation.

  REAL EVENTS WEAVE dramas that fiction would never dare: Babette Gross had a sister named Margarete, as romantically enchanted as she with radical politics in the early hallucinatory and convulsive days of the Weimar Republic. Margarete, like her sister, married a professional revolutionary, Heinz Neumann, the leader of the German Communist Party. In early February 1933, when Hitler was recently named chancellor of the Reich, Münzenberg and Babette flee from Germany in the large black Lincoln to take refuge in Paris; Neumann and Margarete escape to Russia. There he falls from favor and is arrested and executed, shot in the nape of the neck; his wife is sent to a camp in the frozen north of Siberia.

  In the spring of 1939, when the German-Soviet pact is signed, one of the clauses guarantees that German citizens who fled from Nazism and took political asylum in the Soviet Union will be sent back to
Germany. No frontier is a refuge; all close like traps on the feet of the hunted. Margarete is transferred by train from Siberia to the border of a recently divided Poland, and the Soviet guards hand her over to the guards of the SS. After three years in a Soviet camp, she spends another five in a German death camp.

  In Ravensbrück, where Communist prisoners treat her like a traitor, she meets a Czech woman, Milena Jesenska, who twenty years earlier was the love of Franz Kafka’s life and who moved in the same radical and bohemian circles frequented by Otto Katz before he emigrated to Berlin and there crossed paths with Münzenberg. In that Ravensbrück camp, Margarete, who never heard of Kafka, listens as Milena tells the story of the traveling salesman who wakes one morning turned into an enormous insect, and the story about the man who without knowing what crime he has committed is subjected to a spectral trial, found guilty before he is tried, then executed like a dog in an open field in the middle of the night. Milena, starving and ill, dies in May 1944, only shortly before news reaches the camp that the Russians are advancing from the east and the Allies have landed in Normandy. But the proximity of the Red Army offers no hope of freedom to Margarete, only the threat of a new captivity, of the repetition of a nightmare. She escapes from the German camp in the confusion of the last days, flees through two European armies—Germans in retreat and Soviets advancing—two hells and eight years that she survived with unbelievable fortitude.

  IN 1989, AT NINETY, her sister Babette relates it all to an American journalist named Stephen Koch, who is writing the book about Willi Münzenberg that I will discover by chance seven years later. Babette lives in Munich, alone and lucid, still ramrod straight, the youthful gleam in her eyes undimmed. There is a fanatic intensity in the way she sometimes focuses on the young man, the diabolical determination to live and endure that sustains some extremist elders. Shortly afterward she moves to Berlin, and her apartment is not very far from the Wall; some nights she must have heard the sound of the crowds demonstrating on the other side, and the roar of skyrockets and songs of celebration would have reached her bedroom on the night of November 9 when the Wall finally came down, the world that she, her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law believed in sixty years before, the world they helped create.

  The woman speaks in a low, clear voice, in the accented but perfect English of the upper-class British of the 1920s, and that voice, like her eyes, is much younger than her years. Everything happened so long ago, it’s as if it never happened. Everything she knows and remembers will cease to exist in a few months, when she dies. The face of Willi Münzenberg will be lost with her, the smell of his body and the cigars he smoked, his enthusiasm, and the way he was sapped first by losing faith, then by the suspicion that he was being followed and the conviction that there would be no forgiveness for him. His intelligence, too, was eroded by the discovery that he, the inventor of lies, had himself been deceived, that he hadn’t wanted to see what was right before his eyes—all this he tried to tell in a hastily written, tumultuous book when it was already too late, when the intellectuals he had bewitched, used, and scorned for so long turned their backs on him, and his name was carefully being eliminated from the annals of his time.

  Messengers came to transmit the order that he was wanted in Moscow. He invented delays, pretexts for postponing the trip, because it was unthinkable that he would openly refuse to obey. Others he knew had gone to Moscow and never returned; all trace of their activities was erased, even their names, or they were publicly denounced in Party newspapers as monstrously disloyal. Münzenberg knew all too well how a campaign of international indignation was organized, how easily reality could be reshaped with the clever use of publicity techniques such as tedious and relentless repetition.

  He couldn’t go to Moscow now, he said, during that first summer of the war in Spain, just when he was called on once again to summon all his talents as organizer and propagandist in defense of the last of the great causes, the one closest to his heart after the fall of Germany: international solidarity with the Spanish Republic, with the government of the Popular Front.

  But the messages and secret orders kept coming, briefer and more urgent, more threatening, even as news was filtering through of arrests and interrogations. In November 1936, Münzenberg and Babette Gross traveled to Moscow. He was still a high official of the Comintern and the German Communist Party, but there was no one to greet them at the station. A couple of foreigners dressed in opulent winter clothing stood in the grit and poverty of a Soviet train station, the man in his felt hat and long custom-made overcoat, the woman in high heels and silk stockings, her face powdered and her blond hair peeking from the collar of her fur coat. Beside them were piles of luggage appropriate for deluxe trains and the best cabins on transatlantic steamers, leather suitcases with brass fittings and stickers from international hotels, trunks, makeup cases, hatboxes: they are a portrait for an ad printed on the glossy pages of a 1930s magazine, one of those publications Münzenberg dreamed up and directed.

  No one waits at the hotel they were assigned to, and there is no message for them in their room. From the window, from one of the top floors of an enormous hotel only recently constructed but already dark and depressing, where uniformed, armed women stand guard at the end of the corridors in a silence uninterrupted by voices or ringing telephones, Münzenberg and Babette can see in the distance, high above the dark rooftops, a red star shining at the very top of a skyscraper. This is the world they have dedicated their lives to, the only country to which it was legitimate for an internationalist to swear loyalty. It is so cold in the room they don’t take off their coats. There is a black telephone on the night table, but it’s disconnected or out of order. Even so, they look at it with the hope, or the fear, that it will begin to ring. As is routine, their passports were taken from them as they entered the USSR, and they have no tickets or return date.

  The only word Münzenberg has received is that he is to wait. He will be received and heard in good time. His inability to do nothing at all makes the waiting worse than the fear. The man and the woman, accustomed to the good life, to the brilliant social activity of Berlin and Paris, are left alone and confined to a Moscow hotel, reluctant to step outside into the wintry streets that seem so gloomy compared with the lights of the capitals of Europe where they have always lived. If they go out for a walk, there will be someone following them. If they go down to the lobby or the dining room, someone will make note of their every move, and if they speak above a whisper, the waiter who serves them tea will remember every word they say. They will be overheard if they make a telephone call, and if they send a letter to Paris, someone will scrutinize it under a strong lamp, inspect it for secret messages, and keep it as material proof of something, whether espionage or treachery.

  At the end of several identical days, someone knocks at the door. After an instant of uncertainty, Münzenberg and Babette, tense and pale, find themselves confronting the familiar and yet by now nearly unrecognizable faces of Heinz and Margarete Neumann, the only ones who have decided to, or dared to, visit them. Perhaps they dared because they know they are already condemned, because they too are living the isolation of a contagious illness. Once infected, you can approach only someone who suffers the same illness. The two blond sisters and the two men of working-class origins: four lives trapped together. They speak in low voices, huddled close, all wearing their overcoats in the icy hotel room in Moscow, whispering for fear of microphones, so many things to tell after so many years of separation, so little time to say it all, to exchange warnings, for at any moment men in black leather coats very much like the uniforms of the Gestapo can knock at the door, or kick it down.

  They say good-bye, knowing that the four of them will never be together again. Within a few months Neumann is arrested and disappears into the offices and dungeons of Lubyanka Prison, where just outside the front door stands a gigantic statue of Feliks Dzerzhinski, the Polish aristocrat who founded Lenin’s secret police, a man Münzenberg knew v
ery well in the early years of the Revolution.

  But the past counts for nothing, it can even become a basis for guilt. Koestler writes that ministers and dukes once bowed before the decisive and rough authority of Willi Münzenberg, but in Moscow no one welcomes him, no one returns his calls. He was everything, and now he is no one: the past is as remote as the bright lights of Paris and Berlin remembered in the gloomy monotony of a Moscow where the only illumination in the streets comes from the black cars of the secret police.

  He organized the international campaign that made Dimitrov a hero, not of communism but of popular and democratic resistance to the Nazis. Thanks to him, German judges had to let Dimitrov go free, and now, in Moscow, he is the head of the Comintern. But Dimitrov doesn’t return Münzenberg’s messages; he is never in his office when Münzenberg tries to call on him, and no one knows how long it will be before he returns to Moscow.

  The Club of Innocents, the credulous, the idiots of goodwill, the deceived and sacrificed who receive no reward—I have been one of them, Münzenberg thinks during sleepless nights in his hotel room. I helped Hitler and Stalin destroy Europe with equal brutality. I helped invent the legend of their struggle to the death. I was a pawn when in the intoxication of my pride I thought I was directing the game from the shadows.

  Maybe his life isn’t that important to him, less important even than all the money, power, and luxury he has had and lost. What matters is that Babette may suffer, that she may be dragged down and have to suffer for the mistakes he made, all the lies he helped spread. To save her, he does not yield, he besieges the directors of the Comintern who once were his friends or subordinates and now pretend not to know him, he brandishes old credentials that now have no currency: his world campaign for aid to Soviet workers during the years of hunger, his early loyalty to the Bolsheviks during the mythological times of the Revolution, the confidence Lenin placed in him. You will die of your convictions. In the sinister and icy mausoleum on Red Square, in a faint illumination reminiscent of a chapel, he has gazed upon the mummy of his former protector, an unrecognizable face with the dull consistency of wax, lids closed over Asiatic eyes. We have come to the kingdom of the dead, and they will not let us return.