Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  IT ISN’T THE WAY NOW it was before the war, when we used to go with my mother and father, and my brother and I would look at them, raising our fists just the way they did, there on Calle Alcalá, which turned into a sea of people and red flags, or in the Soviet Union in Red Square on May 1 the year the war ended, where there wasn’t room for any more people or shouting or flags or songs or fervor, with millions cheering for Stalin. Squashed in the crowd, I cheered too, excited to think that the tiny figure I could see on the platform atop Lenin’s mausoleum in the distance was him, and I cried with joy and gratitude because he had led us in the victory over Germany, which cost so many Soviet lives, my poor brother among them, although now you would think that the Americans won that war, that they were the only ones who fought, and people know about the landing in Normandy but don’t know that the German army met its first defeat at Stalingrad, in the bloodiest and most heroic battle of the war. No one even knows there was a city called Stalingrad, they didn’t lose any time changing that name, like they did with Leningrad, what a disgrace that now it’s called what it was in the time of the czars, Saint Petersburg, and they even want to canonize Nicholas II, who ordered machine guns to fire on the people in front of the Winter Palace. Oh, I see your expression, though you’re trying to hide it, don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking, all those stories about Stalin’s concentration camps and Stalin’s crimes, as if he had done nothing but kill people, or as if everyone who was sentenced to the camps were innocent. Of course there were mistakes, the Party itself recognized that at its Twentieth Congress, and denounced the cult of personality, and did everything possible to remedy injustices and rehabilitate those who weren’t guilty, but how could there not be a personality cult when Stalin had done so much for us, for the Soviet people and for workers around the world? He was responsible for the great leap from backwardness to industrialization, the Five Year Plans that were the envy and admiration of all the world, when in only twenty years the Soviet Union moved from being a rural country to a world power. And all that under the worst circumstances, following a war provoked by the imperialists, in the midst of a siege and an international blockade, in a country with shortages of everything and where the great majority of the population was illiterate, a slave to the czar and the popes. Look what they were, or what we were, because I’ve been a Soviet citizen, and look how the country is now, how in a few years they’ve destroyed what it cost several generations to build, the largest country in the world broken up into pieces and Russia in the hands of the Mafia and governed by a drunk, so don’t tell me things are better now than in Stalin’s time, or Brezhnev’s, when they say the people suffered such oppression. What they don’t say is that there were saboteurs and spies everywhere, that imperialism employed the dirtiest tactics to destroy the Revolution, and that Jews had taken over many of the key posts in the government and were conspiring to benefit the United States and Israel.

  JEWS, OH YES, SEÑOR, don’t give me that look, as if you’d never heard a word about that; don’t you know that some Jewish physicians plotted to murder Stalin? There was always someone to take advantage, to abuse the trust that Stalin and the Party put in him in order to line his own pockets or to gain power, but in the end those people paid for their sins, because Stalin was so upright that he wouldn’t allow it. Yezhov paid, that man who committed so many abuses, who jailed so many innocents, and then Yagoda paid, although they said that the worst of all of them was Beria, who managed to deceive Stalin to the end but who also got his, and they say that when they came to kill him he fell to his knees and begged and shrieked, so tell me whether or not justice was served in the Soviet Union. But now they want to hide everything, erase it all, even the names, they want to make everyone believe that the Soviet people were oppressed, or paralyzed with fear, or that the death of Stalin was a liberation, but I was there and know what happened, what the people felt. I was in Moscow the morning they announced on the radio that Stalin died, I was in the kitchen fixing myself a cup of coffee—I’d woken up not feeling well because I was pregnant with my first child—and then music began to play on the radio, then stopped, and there was a silence, and an announcer spoke, he said something but his voice broke, he was sobbing, and I almost didn’t understand him when he said that Comrade Stalin had died. I couldn’t believe it, it was like when they told me my brother had died at Leningrad, or when my father died, but my brother was in the war and I had accepted that he might die, and my father was very old and he didn’t have a lot longer to live, but it never occurred to me that Stalin could die, I don’t think it had to anyone, for us he was more than a father or a leader, he was what God should be to believers. I ran outside, not knowing where I was going, without a coat though it was snowing, and in the street I met a lot of people just like me, wandering about like sleepwalkers, they would stop at a corner and weep, old women bawling like babies, soldiers crying like little boys, workers, everyone, a crowd that carried me along, like a river of bodies beneath the snow, toward Red Square as if by instinct, but the streets were already flooded with people and we couldn’t go any farther, and someone said that Red Square was roped off and we should head for the Union Palace. I’m sitting here now and it doesn’t seem possible that I was in Moscow that morning, that I lived all that, that flood of tears and helplessness, women on their knees in the snow and shouting and calling out to Stalin, funeral music on the loudspeakers that had played such spirited anthems on May Day. I was crying too, and hugging someone, a woman I’d never seen, feeling the kicking in my womb, my son who would be born two months later and who, it seemed to me, would be born an orphan even though he had a father, because none of us could imagine life without Stalin, and we wept from pain but also from fear, finding ourselves defenseless after all those years when he had always watched over us.

  IN OUR HOME, WHEN I was little, my parents talked to me about Russia and Stalin, and when the boat bringing us from Spain reached the port of Leningrad the first thing we saw was a huge portrait of him, which seemed to welcome and smile at us, just as we had seen him once in a newsreel, smiling at a child he had swept up in his arms. But it was snowing harder now, and there were more and more people in the street, and we couldn’t move in the crowd, and above the music on the loudspeakers we heard the sirens blowing in the factories, all the sirens in Moscow blowing at the same time, as they had for air raids during the war. That was when I began to feel trapped, reminded of running downstairs to a shelter afraid I would trip and people would fall over me. I couldn’t breathe, with people pressing from all sides, men and women in overcoats and caps, their breath on my face and neck, the smell of bodies that needed to be washed and of damp clothing. My mouth wide open to breathe, I broke into a sweat but also shivered with cold, trying to cover my belly with both hands because the baby was squirming inside me harder than ever, as if he too felt caged and crushed. I pushed, begged, wept, and pointed to my swollen belly, because I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and make it to a street that wasn’t crowded, where I could hurry back home, gasping for breath, clutching my belly because the baby was twisting so much I thought I was going to have him right there, in the middle of that crowd that wouldn’t budge one centimeter, all wrapped in their overcoats and caps, their breath frosty amid the snowflakes, and I like an idiot without a kerchief or boots. Finally I was free, suddenly alone, my hair soaking wet, lost in Moscow with no one to ask for directions. I tell all this to my son, and he says, “Mother, you’ve told me this a thousand times.” He says it in Russian, of course, because he hardly speaks Spanish although he has Spanish looks, which I’m proud of. His father, may he rest in peace, was from Ukraine. I saw my boy dressed as a soldier when he did his military service and I thought I was seeing his uncle, my brother, just as tall and dark, just as happy, with the visor of his cap tilted to one side, a cigarette in his mouth, and his eyes squinted like the movie stars I’d liked so much as a girl. It’s two years now since I’ve seen my son, I don’t even
know my youngest grandson, because with what I earn I don’t have money for a ticket to Moscow, and he’s a chemical engineer and his salary barely stretches to take care of his family. Sometimes I send him a few dollars so he can make it to the end of the month or buy a little car for my grandson, although I get only the minimum pension in Spain, a charity case, he has no idea the years and troubles it cost me to earn it, but my Russian pension isn’t worth anything, a few rubles after having worked my entire life.

  Lenin said it, freedom for what? Why did we mining people want freedom for the Republic if they sent us off to the Legion and the Guardia Civil and chased down the strikers and shot them as if they were animals? They locked up my mother, who hadn’t done anything, just for being the wife of a unionist, and tortured my father and sent him to a penal colony in Africa, to Fernando Poo. When the Popular Front issued the amnesty, he came home sick with malaria, so aged and jaundiced I didn’t recognize him and burst out crying when he hugged me. I didn’t want him ever to go away, from the time I was little I couldn’t sleep until my father came home from the mine, and I did everything possible to stay awake till he came, or I woke up if he had the night shift and came in before dawn. How happy I was to hear him push the door open and hear his voice and cough and smell his cigarette smoke, I can smell it this minute, even though it’s been more than sixty years. I sit here and the memories come, and with them the smell of things and the sounds from those days that don’t exist any longer. I remember my father’s eyes shining in a face black with coal dust, the way he had of knocking at the door, and I would think, he’s come, nothing’s happened to him, there hasn’t been an explosion in the mine and he hasn’t been carted off by the Guardia Civil. I’ve lived through so many things, been so many places, in Siberia, on a ship trapped in ice in the Baltic Sea, in those garrisons in the Urals where they sent my husband, when we couldn’t go out at night because of the wolves howling in the forests. I would have given anything to have a family like other girls, even those poorer than us in the mining town where we lived, those girls might have gone to school barefoot and with lice but at least their fathers weren’t arrested from time to time and didn’t have to hide for months, and they didn’t leave their children alone all night to go to their meetings of committees and unions. The only thing I ever wanted but never had was to live in peace, to have my house, to get along with my modest lot and not have unexpected things happen. My first memories are of hurried moves and nights on benches in train stations, of being afraid that something terrible would happen, that the guardias had killed my father or that he’d died in an explosion or cave-in at the mine. My heart still pounds when I think of it, I look at him in that photograph on the piano and it seems he’s still alive, at my side with a gift in his hand he brought me from a trip, that little mother-of-pearl box, for example, when he came back from Russia and had been gone so long I didn’t know him and started crying when I saw him. I never told this to anyone, but the dreams I had as a little girl were petit bourgeois dreams. I always wanted my parents and my brother nearby, and to go to school and occasionally to mass, and to take Communion like the girls I saw coming out of church dressed in white with their rosaries and mother-of-pearl prayer books in their hands, and patent-leather shoes, not like me, who wore old espadrilles even in the winter, my feet like ice and mud clinging to the hemp soles. I was always hearing my parents talk about the Revolution, but what I wanted was for my father not to miss his pay and for us to have a warm meal every day, and good blankets and coats and boots in the winter. I was frightened when he talked about emigrating to America or when he told us that we had to go to Russia because that was the homeland of the workers of the world. Our house near the mine was little more than a hut, although my mother kept it swept and orderly, but I cried when we left it to move to Madrid, it felt like they were ripping out my heart. We got onto the train and my brother, being so little, was wildly happy, but I was dying because we had to leave our clean little house and the school I liked so much and my friends. But after a few months in Madrid I got used to it and wanted all the neighbor women and ladies in the shops to know me, I made friends with the girls in the school and with the teacher who scolded them the first day when they made fun of the way I spoke, which must have been with a strong Asturias accent. We lived in a building in the Tetuán barrio, two rooms in a crowded corridor, but my mother fixed them up right away with the few things we owned, and it seemed that finally we’d moved into a real house, and for the first time the toilet—the servicio they called it then—was indoors at the end of the corridor, not in a courtyard or out in the field, like a place for animals. My father didn’t have to go to the mine anymore, he had a job I didn’t know anything about, at a newspaper or with the union, and at first I thought we were going to live a normal life, that I wouldn’t have to be afraid every time he was late or they went out on strike and had meetings in our house, which I hated because the men smoked so much you couldn’t breathe and they left behind a smell that took days to disappear and my mother and I had to sweep up the butts and ashes.

  What I liked was going to school, and that my teacher liked me a lot, and I wouldn’t have minded also going to confession and Communion—so young and already with ideological conflicts. I dreamed of getting a job in a dressmaker’s shop when I finished school, of embroidering my own trousseau and becoming close friends with the girls who worked with me. I grew so fond of Madrid that I imagined I would live there forever, and quickly picked up the way the other girls talked, and I liked boarding the trolleys and learning to get around on the metro, and when my brother and I could get a few centimos together we would go and sit in the gallery of some theater to watch Clark Gable movies or Laurel and Hardy. I said “there” when I was talking about Madrid, as if I weren’t in Madrid this very minute, but I often forget and wake up thinking I’m in Moscow. But if I say “there” it’s as if I were saying “then,” because that Madrid was a different city from the one I find when I go outside today, or when I go out on the balcony, which I seldom do because of the noise of the cars on the expressway day and night, something I can’t get used to. My friends tell me to get double-pane windows, but how can I spend that kind of money on my income? But with all we’ve gone through, I’m not going to complain about traffic noise, it’s not half as bad as the sound of bombing, or spending the winter in a garrison at forty degrees below, and it’s a lot worse to be dead. This is the best house I ever lived in, and best of all I won’t have to move until the day they carry me to the cemetery, and I have my spot assured there too, in the civil cemetery, beside my mother, the two of us together in the tomb the way we always were in life, except for those horrible first years in Russia when I was alone and didn’t know if I would see her again or if she and my father were dead, or had forgotten about me, being so busy with their war and their Revolution.