Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  FIRST WAS THAT WORD, Juden. Then, maybe two hours later, he met a woman at the dance, a beautiful redhead with green eyes. He walked into a room filled with people, noise, and music and immediately picked her out, as if no one else were there, and in the first look they exchanged he knew she wasn’t German in the same way she knew that despite his uniform he was not like the other military men there. The city would have been dark, with no lights except at the street corners, a Baltic city in the winter of the war, occupied by the German army, under curfew, split by a river that would soon freeze and from which a fog rose that wets the paving stones and the streetcar tracks and seemed denser in the headlights of the military trucks.

  My friend doesn’t describe the place where the dance was held, but I imagine it as I listen to him talk: one of those official buildings I’ve seen in Nordic countries, white columns and pale-yellow stucco, a cobbled square, its stones shining in the night damp, crisscrossed by streetcar tracks and cables, and at the rear a requisitioned mansion that is the only place where the windows are lit and from which music spills out to the square with the unexpected brilliance of ballroom chandeliers. Sudden light in a dark city, music in the terrified silence of the streets.

  After the front, that place must have had the unreal splendor of a cinematographic mirage. But my friend goes on, ignoring that kind of detail as he ignores the bellow of laughter from the banking executives who are honoring someone at a nearby table, toasting in Spanish and English the success of some financial venture. He erases it all, the ballroom in 1943 and the restaurant of today, the sound of the orchestra and the sound of the cell phones, the gleam of leather on the German uniforms, the crunch of black boots on the gleaming parquet floor, the heel clicks of salutes. How intimidated he must have felt among so many strangers, nearly all of them of higher rank. The only thing that stands out in his story is the figure of the woman he was dancing with and whose name he can’t remember, unless he said it and I didn’t hear, and now I am tempted to invent a name: Gerda or Grete or Anicka: Anicka was the friend of Milena Jesenska in the death camp.

  “I NOTICED HER THE MINUTE I walked into the room. There were officers from the army and the SS, and the blue uniforms of the Luftwaffe. Among all those military men I was the only one not German. Maybe that was why the woman stood looking at me when I walked by her, because she wasn’t German either. A tall redhead wearing silk stockings and a low-cut gown of some flimsy fabric, she wore a perfume I would like to smell once more before I die. You are still young, so you don’t know that some things are not erased by time. So much has happened since then,” my friend calculates mentally, with a smile trapped in a memory whose sweetness can’t be conveyed: fifty-six years ago, and it was November, as now, and he still holds intact the sensation of putting his arm around her waist, noting beneath the cloth the smoothness of a body made even more desirable by his being so long without a woman.

  She was standing, very serious, beside a heavy man in civilian clothes—an ostentatious pinstripe suit—and there was a weary, conjugal air in the way they spoke without looking at each other. My friend doesn’t explain whether it was difficult to overcome his shyness, whether he danced with other women before approaching her, and since he isn’t writing a novel he doesn’t need intermediate episodes, doesn’t need to tell me what happened to the captain he came with. Right now, in his memory, he is alone with the redhead, as if silhouetted against a black background, and the woman doesn’t have a name, either because my friend has forgotten it or because I didn’t hear it and don’t want to give her one.

  They danced and she murmured into his ear, leaning a little toward him but at the same time looking in a different direction, with a distracted, formal air, as if they were in one of those dance halls of the time where men paid to dance with women for the two or three minutes of one song. He had come a long way to meet this woman, had traveled across Europe and through the devastation and mud of Russia and fought at Leningrad, all to hold her in his arms and gradually press her to his waist as he breathed the scent of her hair and skin and listened to her voice, the two of them, arms around each other, alone among all the people crowding the dance floor, scarcely moving to the music. He would look for her when a piece was finished during which he had felt obliged to dance with a different partner. But for her, this woman in the full splendor of her thirty-some years, it wasn’t just interest or desire, there was also a desperation that he had never seen, just as he had never had his arm around a body like hers, it was in her eyes and voice, and also in the way she gripped his hand as she glided lightly across the dance floor, squeezing his fingers as if she wanted to convey an urgency that he first thought was sexual and perhaps was in part. She kept speaking into his ear, at the same time keeping an eye on the couples near them, and never losing sight of the dark-clad man who hadn’t moved from the far end of the room all evening. She smiled at her dancing partner, half closing her eyes as if carried away by the delicious and sensual dizziness of the music, but her words had no relation to the calm and somewhat fatigued expression on her face, only with something at the back of her green eyes, with the way her fingernails dug into the back of his hand.

  “You aren’t like them, even though you wear the uniform. You must leave here and tell what they’re doing to us. They are killing us all, one by one. When they came to Narva there were ten thousand of us Jews, and now there are fewer than two thousand, and the way they’re going, we won’t last through the winter. No one is spared, not the children, not the old, not the newborn. They take them away in trains, and no one ever comes back.”

  “But you’re alive and well, and they invite you to their dances.”

  “Because I go to bed with that pig who was with me when you came in. But as soon as he tires of me or thinks it’s dangerous to have a Jewish mistress, I’ll end up like the others.”

  “Then get out.”

  “And go where? All of Europe is theirs.”

  “Why was he invited, if he isn’t military?”

  “He supplies clothing and food for the army. He buys up the Jews’ properties for nothing.”

  “Must you sleep with him tonight?”

  “Not tonight. His wife is waiting for him. They’re giving a dinner for some generals.”

  “I’ll take you home.”

  “You’re reckless.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon I go back to the front.”

  He wanted to keep holding her and listening to her, he couldn’t bear to have her leave without him at the end of the dance, but when the piece they were dancing ended and a German officer moved him aside politely but firmly to dance the next dance with her, he couldn’t refuse, because the man in the pinstripe suit was watching her from a distance and maybe had already observed with displeasure that it was a long time since she changed partners, maybe had even guessed what she was saying to the young lieutenant who looked so little like a German despite the uniform. Strong as his desire was, he wanted to protect her and needed to know more, and he began to fear the looming darkness he had ignored until then, the dreadful suspicion of what was unimaginable yet couldn’t be denied. He looked around at the red German faces, the elegance of the uniforms identical to his, which had given him such a thrill the first time he put it on, and felt an instinctive revulsion, though the monstrous thing was invisible, like the desperation of the woman dancing with him, moving her head to the rhythm of the music and smiling, closing her eyes and digging her fingernails into the back of his hand, repeating in a low voice the words that my friend kept hearing long afterward and that still return to him on sleepless nights when the darkness is peopled with the voices and faces of the dead. But the two faces he remembers most clearly are that of the young man in the pince-nez who turned toward him on the road as if wanting to tell him something, and that of the woman he danced with over and over, he doesn’t know how many times, falling in love with her and being infected by her fear, her clear vision, her fatalism. What would her voice sound like now? With
what accent would she speak German? Now, as I write, reliving what my friend told me, I would invent her, say that she was Sephardic by birth and spoke a few words to him in Ladino, establishing with him, in that remote city in Estonia and in the midst of all those German officers, the melancholy complicity of a secretly shared fatherland.

  But it isn’t necessary to invent or add a thing for that woman to materialize, to appear to me in the restaurant where my friend and I were talking amid all the noise and people, in the mix of conversations, steam from hot dishes, cigarettes, cell phones. He who has not been able to forget her for more than half a century has bequeathed her to me now, transferring the memory of her to my imagination, but I won’t give her an origin or a name, I haven’t the authority, she isn’t a ghost or fictional character but someone who was as real as I am, who had a destiny as unique as mine although far more cruel, a biography that can neither be supplanted by the beautiful lie of literature nor reduced to arithmetical data, another cipher among the immense number of the dead. “Fifty-six years I’ve been remembering her, and I always wonder whether she survived or died in one of those camps that we knew nothing about then, not because they were run in absolute secrecy, since that is impossible, it would have been like keeping the operations of the railway system of an entire nation secret, but because we didn’t want to believe the unbelievable. I went back to Narva thirty years later, when I traveled for the first time to Leningrad, to a psychology conference organized by UNESCO. It wasn’t easy to do, but I obtained permission to visit the city, although they assigned me a Soviet guide who didn’t leave me alone for a minute. Now the name was written on the station platform in Cyrillic characters, and the road along the river was gone, and in its place was an entire neighborhood of those horrid cement-colored buildings. It must seem absurd to you, and it was so then to me, but the minute I arrived in Narva I started looking at every woman, with my heart in my mouth, as if I might run into her and recognize her after thirty years. Looking not for a woman a little older than I was, which would have made her over sixty, but the same young redhead I danced with that night, falling more in love with her by the minute, weak with desire, so excited that I was dizzy, and afraid she could see, or someone else could, despite the heavy cloth of my trousers, how aroused I was.

  The Soviet guide or watchdog made a show of glancing at his watch and gave my friend a disgusted look, and reminded him that they would have to go back to the station soon, they couldn’t miss the return train to Leningrad, but my friend kept walking, ignoring his guide and leaving him a few paces behind, slightly bent over and moving quickly, as he did when we left the restaurant, his wise little eyes darting everywhere. Turning a corner, he recognized the cobbled square and the mansion where the dance had been held and the streetcar tracks, which had the same film of dirt and neglect as the facade of the mansion, which now, according to the guide, was the headquarters of Estonia’s unions. He didn’t recall all the cables strung from one side of the square to the other, and of course the gigantic statue of Lenin in the center, circled by streetcars clanging and jerking along, came afterward. But he perceived the same icy damp edge to the air and the smell of the river that couldn’t be far away, now mixed with the general odor of boiled cabbage and bad gasoline that seemed to be the indelible essence of the Soviet Union. Time did not exist; he heard the footsteps of hundreds of men on the hard-packed dirt of a road and the wire barbs scraping the ground, and saw a thin, pale face turned toward him, eyes again appealing to him through pince-nez glasses, then slowly disappearing down the road and the years to fade into the unbridgeable gulf between those who died and those who were saved, those who were now in the ground and those who walked across it with the lightheartedness of people who don’t realize that wherever they step, they are stepping on graves.

  “HOW STRANGE TO BE standing at a streetcar stop across from the mansion and see yourself as you were thirty years before, because it isn’t that I was remembering,” my friend says. “I was literally seeing myself, the way you might see someone in the street and have trouble recognizing him because it’s been so long since the last time. I was so young, so different, a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in a German uniform.” I could feel what he was feeling at that moment, the excitement and suspense of the waiting, the fear that his friend the captain might appear and suspect something or simply tell him he had to go back to headquarters. Because before leaving him to dance with a commander of the SS, the redheaded woman had told him to let a half hour go by and then meet her on the other side of the square beneath the shelter for the streetcar stop. He watched her move away through the dancing couples, now in the arms of the man in the black uniform, who was a little taller than she, casually turning to look for him while talking to her partner. He had to give her time to make small talk with some friends of her lover, who had never taken his eyes off her and who now and then sent short, precise signals to her, time to say good-bye. He didn’t need to have someone take her home since she lived only two stops away on the streetcar. “I won’t leave you alone for a moment,” my friend told her, not being foolhardy but with the same assurance and absence of fear he felt sometimes as he leaped over a trench, immune to bullets, exalted and agile, pistol in hand, hoarse from shouting orders to the soldiers advancing behind him, fighting through the clay and tangles of wire and cadavers strewn across the no-man’s-land. “I won’t leave you by yourself,” he told her again, when their dance ended and she tried to step away from him because the SS commander was waiting his turn. “If you want to help me, do as I told you,” she pleaded, with an urgency that widened her eyes, and immediately smiled at the German officer who took her in his arms with a polite nod to my friend.

  Thirty years later he saw himself from the other side of the square, a solitary figure standing at the streetcar stop in a cone of light, the cobbles wet from the fog. He looked at the windows of the mansion where the dancing was still in full swing, and heard very faintly the music of the orchestra and the sound his feet made as he stamped them to keep warm, the echoes that spread across the wide, open space. He was at the same time the young lieutenant who counted the minutes, jumping out of his skin with hope and disappointment every time the door of the mansion opened. He felt both the wrenching impatience of someone who doesn’t know what the next minute will bring and the melancholy compassion of knowing what it brought: the young man waited for more than an hour, more desolate by the minute, and then went back to the ballroom to look for the redheaded woman, but did not find her, neither her nor her protector in the garish pinstripe suit, nor the SS commander who had bowed so ceremoniously when he claimed her. The lieutenant looked for her on the dance floor, then in the large room where drinks and canapés were being served, and walked through corridors where there was no one at all and through salons and libraries lit by large crystal chandeliers.

  “And I never saw her again,” he says, making a gesture with two upraised hands, as if to indicate a thing that vanishes into thin air. It occurred to him that maybe she had left without his seeing her and was waiting for him at the streetcar stop, and if he didn’t hurry she would tire of waiting and leave, and then it would be too late to get her address, but in the vestibule he ran into the captain he’d come with and who had been looking for him. The captain said it was late and they had to get back to the barracks.

  THERE IS NO NOISE NOW in the restaurant. Without realizing it, we have lingered until we are the only ones left. A waiter helps my friend into his navy-blue jacket, which accentuates the stoop of his shoulders. Watching him walk ahead of me toward the exit, I remember that he is a man of eighty. Outside we are surprised to find the pale light of early dusk, and the air is damp. My friend offers to take me home in his car.

  “I still like to drive, although now and then I get into trouble when people see how old I am. One jerk yelled at me the other day at a traffic light, said it was time for me to pick out my coffin. I asked him, ‘You want to bury me alive?’ He scowled, rolled up
his window, and shot off ahead of me. Generalizations are harmful, I should know, but the real problem is our species. We’re aggressive primates, much more dangerous than gorillas or chimpanzees; we carry cruelty and the will to dominate in our brains, and we get the oldest part of the brain from our reptile ancestors. It’s all in Darwin, to our misfortune. I know the theory that’s going around, that in the evolution of the species the instinct for cooperation has served us better than the law of the survival of the fittest. Except that some primates cooperate to wipe others out. Look how well the Nazis and Communists cooperated, how many millions of dead they left behind. But it’s not just them, think of Bosnia, or Rwanda just a while back, only yesterday, a million people murdered in a few months’ time, and with machetes and clubs, not the technology the Germans had. Who knows what evil is being perpetrated this very moment while you and I are talking? I don’t sleep much anymore, I lie in the darkness waiting for the dawn and remember all the dead I’ve seen rotting between our lines and the Russian positions, the bodies lying in ditches along the highways as we approached the front, or piled into trucks, stiff from the cold. I could easily have been one of them. And I see them all, one after another, and they look at me like that Jew in the pince-nez, and tell me that because I’m alive I have the obligation to speak for them, say what was done, so that the little that remains of them in people’s memories will not be lost for all time.”

  We passed the park where the Egyptian temple of Debod is now, and I remember that the La Montana barracks stood in that very place. Here too we walk over tombs without names, over common graves. I remember black-and-white photographs and films of the first days of the Civil War, when my friend was a boy of sixteen studying Greek and Latin and German in the Institute and staying up late at night reading Nietzsche, Rilke, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Ortega, when there was no way he could have known that in a few years he would be a decorated war hero. Not far from where we are now, in those gardens where the ruins of an Egyptian temple are enshrined and mothers walk their children and retirees take the afternoon sun, there was an esplanade filled with dead more than sixty years ago. On the same sidewalk where my friend and I are walking bombs fell during Franco’s siege of Madrid.