Crossings

by Alex Landragin

  {349}

  The Hotel Room

  FOR THE NEXT day and night, the train advanced southward in fits and starts, hurtling forward for an hour or two, then inexplicably grinding to a stop at some tiny village or junction in the middle of fields. We were not strafed or bombed, and the journey had an air of unreality about it, as if I’d fallen asleep and was dreaming of a train journey in a landscape mysteriously emptied of people. It was only when we clattered through Nevers that I realised we were headed into the centre of the country. All day and night, we continued in this stop-start way. Under the crescent moon, the train traversed high plateaus, and I could see miles into the distance over somnolent countryside. The thrum of the engine, the swaying of the carriages and the ricochets of the tracks rocked me to sleep and back again several times. We passed villages I’d never heard of, forlorn little places with poetic names like Montluçon and Ussel, Brive-la-Gaillarde and Figeac. By sunrise the following morning we entered the outskirts of Toulouse, where many of the passengers alighted, but a porter told me through the window that the train was continuing south to Lourdes, in the mountains near Spain, and I remained on board. It was a place of pilgrimage, so I reasoned the locals would be more accommodating than most.

  Lourdes was filled to bursting with refugees and Catholic pilgrims glowing with religious fervour. They’d come from far and wide to pray for France. I found a vacant room with a little writing desk on the second floor of a boarding house. From the window, I could see the spire of the basilica and the mountains. Within days of my arrival, the newspapers and radio announced that France was to be divided in two: there would be an occupied zone in the north and west, while the south and east would be a neutral zone governed from Vichy, that wedding-cake spa resort that would henceforth be the capital of the new puppet regime. I thought of my old concierge Madame Barbier and her husband, who’d gone there to flee the Germans, only now to find themselves surrounded by them. At the cinema, a newsreel showed footage of Hitler touring Paris alongside Albert Speer and others. The streets were sprinkled with people cheering hesitantly for the camera. Hitler stood on the Eiffel Tower and surveyed his new dominion. I had to look away.

  I spent my days writing. I wrote everything that had happened to me since I’d first met Madeleine in the cemetery only weeks before and I transcribed my notes of her stories. It was a way of both remembering her and forgetting her. I avoided the company of others for fear of attracting attention to myself. Mornings, I wrote or visited the post office, the town hall or the police station, applying for a travel permit to go overland to Spain or by rail to Marseille.

  Afternoons, I wandered through the gloomy hills behind the town or down to the grounds of the basilica, where legions of sick and infirm pilgrims gathered, many in wheelchairs pushed by nuns, to drink the spring waters they believed would miraculously cure them. I avoided the news and the intrigues of my fellow émigrés. Every newspaper was a summons, every radio broadcast the news of fateful tidings, every knock at the door a policeman sent to arrest me.

  In late August I was finally granted permission to travel by train to Marseille. A short distance from the terminus, I alighted the train to avoid a police check. I trudged across the scraggy limestone hills with my black suitcase and the satchel containing the manuscript until I came to an incline overlooking the city. It stretched out before me in the early morning light, cradled between white mountains and a turquoise sea. I walked on into town and caught a streetcar to the port, greeted by the city’s familiar perfume: oil, urine and printer’s ink. Turned away from every hotel on the harbour, I scoured the backstreets and alleyways until I found a room in a dingy hotel overlooking the Cours Belsunce.

  Marseille was a hive of deserters, outcasts, artists, philosophers and criminals. Arrivals swelled daily. No raid, no decree, no threat of internment could keep them from coming. They came because it was the last French port from which ships were still sailing. The city was the bottleneck through which all had to pass. Conversations invariably revolved around the same themes: passports, visas, travel permits, bonds, port authority stamps, certificates, currencies and lists. Each one of these themes had endless variations: real, substitute and counterfeit passports; entry, exit and transit visas; refugee, customs, health and discharge certificates; old, new and counterfeit currencies; police lists, passenger lists, prefectural lists. Everyone guarded their papers as if their lives depended on them, which was indeed the case, and all the while the authorities invented cleverer ways to sort, classify, register and stamp us like sheep in an abattoir. One spent hours in a café hoping for some morsel of useful information, but rumours flew about so wildly it was impossible to distinguish truth from fiction. A whole day could be spent in a waiting room, the air thick with exhaustion, only for someone behind a counter to tell you to return the next day, the next week or even, as August came around and government offices began to close for the summer holidays, the next month. Applicants would fill out endless forms, whisper among themselves, doze or rehearse their stories for their interviews. A single slip-up – eleven photographs instead of twelve, for instance – and the entire chain of documents, each one with its own expiry date, could unravel.

  At the Hôtel Splendide I found Fritz standing in the lobby one morning soon after my arrival and, though it had only been a couple of months since I’d last seen him at the station in Paris, we hugged as if reuniting after a long estrangement. Fritz told me Arthur was also in town, and the three of us went for a drink. It was a non-alcohol day, according to the wartime regulations, but the bartender added some schnapps to our chicory coffees.

  ‘Whatever happened to that girlfriend of yours?’ asked Arthur.

  ‘She decided to stay in Paris,’ I replied.

  ‘Ah,’ they both said, nodding their heads knowingly, and she was never mentioned again. Such stories were common.

  Fritz and I were in the same boat: he was unable to procure an exit visa. Without permission to leave France, every other jewel – a Portuguese transit visa, an American entry visa – was worthless. Arthur had had all kinds of adventures since leaving Paris. His English girlfriend had managed to board a ship leaving Bordeaux for Portsmouth. Between them, they filled me in on the rumoured fates of various friends and acquaintances: one had left for America, another had committed suicide by swallowing veronal in Paris, another still slit his wrists in a prison camp near Avignon. One poor fellow swallowed strychnine, and another disappeared from a camp in Savoy and hadn’t been heard of since.

  Poised precariously between hope and despair, we settled into our temporary lives as the world we’d known became unrecognisable to us. The newspapers and radio became infected by a new kind of language. In the name of national renewal, they preached the virtues of collaboration and authoritarianism, the corruption of trade unions and treacherousness of the Jews. As France’s humiliation was deemed to be a moral failure, the remedy would be a moral revolution. The windows of Jewish shops were smashed. The words liberté, égalité, fraternité, which had recently adorned the entrances of state buildings, were replaced with a new trinity: work, family, fatherland. Labour camps became mandatory: every nineteen-year-old boy would have to work six months in a camp. Monthly food rations were reduced to a pound of sugar, half a pound of pasta, three and a half ounces of rice, four ounces of soap and seven ounces of fats. It was impossible to put a telephone call through to Paris or send a letter there. Packs of officials roamed the streets day and night, throwing anyone they considered suspicious in prison. Without money for a bribe or a lawyer, anyone snaffled in one of these roundups was destined for a camp.

  The American delegation at the Splendide granted me an American visa, but my efforts to procure an exit visa met with disappointment at every turn. I needed a certain stamp, and I didn’t have the certificate required to obtain it. I went through the motions all the same, hoping to be the beneficiary of an error, an oversight, an act of mercy. I joined the throngs waiting from morning to night at the Burea
u des Étrangers. When, after a month, I received the final, definitive refusal, I staggered from the préfecture and wandered aimlessly until I reached the waterfront of the Old Port, entering a bistro simply to escape the blinding sun. I ordered oysters out of grief. They were one of the few things that were not rationed.

  Even at night, the city glowed with a desert heat. Sundays, when the cafés and bars would close and the streets fell into somnolence, were the hardest to endure. The only relief from the heat was to swim in the clear, cold water off the rocks at the little port of Malmousque, one of us looking out for thieves at all times.

  In desperation, Arthur and I tried disguising ourselves as sailors and boarding a ship. But our pasty skin betrayed us as the landlubbers we were and, when challenged for our merchant sailors’ tickets, the ruse was unmasked. We were lucky not to be reported to the police. Soon after, Arthur managed to get all his papers together; he left on a Thursday morning on a boat bound for Lisbon. Fritz and I went to see him off at the pier. ‘If anything happens to you, have you got something?’ I asked. He shook his head. I gave him half of my morphine tablets. He skipped up the gangplank and, minutes later, the ship drifted away from its berth with a blast of its foghorn, in a cloud of fumes.

  Madeleine was never far from my thoughts. Sometimes I would lie in bed at night, unable to sleep, thinking of her in her many guises, mulling over the riddles she’d posed. Remembering her last words, in my idle hours I would sit at a table in a café or at the rickety desk in my hotel room and I would write. The writing held me together. Over several weeks, I wrote out in full the stories she’d told me, trying to recreate the magic of that precious handful of days and nights we’d spent together. It was my way of being close to her. When I was done, I decided to keep writing. This time, I wrote my story, this story, which is after all only a humble story of a brief affair, one of countless such stories, of no consequence to anyone, perhaps, other than me.

  After a month in Marseille, I ran out of options. All the doors had been closed. Unable to leave by sea, I decided to make my way to Portugal overland. The Spanish government had not yet closed the border to refugees from France and I had a Portuguese transit visa. I learned the wife of a friend was smuggling refugees across the border. In Lisbon, I hoped to board a ship bound for America.

  I secured a travel permit to Perpignan. At the appointed hour, Fritz, who was still hoping to make it out on a boat, came to see me off on the overnight train from the Gare Saint-Charles. We climbed the hundred and four steps of the grand stairway that lead to the station. I was, as usual, carrying my black suitcase, which contained this manuscript. We farewelled each other, hugged, wished each other luck, made vague plans for a reunion in some indeterminate place at some indeterminate time. Then he turned around and walked the steps back down the hill, disappearing into the crowd. Another friend, another farewell. I wasn’t sure how many more I could take.

  I travelled to Perpignan with the photographer Henny Gurland and her son Joseph. From there, we travelled on a local train to Port-Vendres and met up with a fresh-faced young German woman called Lisa Fittko, who had taken it upon herself to guide people across the border. She said she would take us over the mountains to Spain on a track dubbed the Lister route, after a Republican officer who, with his men, had made his own escape, in the opposite direction, only a few years earlier. The two of us would do a trial run, she said, as she had yet to traverse the track herself. Together, we went to speak with the local mayor, who was sympathetic. He told us where to go and advised us to leave at dawn with the grape pickers. I knew I would be spending the night up there in the mountains.

  It was still dark when Lisa knocked at my hotel room door, but I was waiting for her, fully dressed and ready to go. We joined the throng of grape harvesters climbing the trail leading up to the vines in the foothills behind the village. They gave us bread, cheese and watered wine for breakfast. Soon enough, the track steepened in the dawn light and, as the sun finally appeared, we left the pickers to their harvest and kept climbing. As feared, my heart was barely up to the task of hauling a suitcase across a mountain. It was beating fast and each contraction was a spasm of pain. For every ten minutes of walking, I had to rest a minute. Lisa was most patient. Our slow progress afforded us the luxury of admiring the views. The world was bathed in a warm, golden glow. A steep bank of late summer clouds was gathering in the south. Behind us, France stretched out in splendour, and the white-fringed shore of the Golfe de Lion curved away to the north-east.

  At times, the track seemed to peter out into nothing. Lisa would walk ahead and call out when she had located it once more. We finally reached the ridge of the mountain in the late afternoon. This was the border. We could clearly see the track that led down into Spain, to the border town of Portbou. As expected, there was no question of my going back to Port-Vendres. Lisa gave me her jacket to keep me warm and, with a wave of her hand, commenced the return to town to fetch the others. I watched her until she disappeared from sight and lit a Salomé to calm my nerves. The sun was already sinking in the west, the shadow of the mountains stretching out across the world. Once the sun was gone, the sky turned its various shades of blue, green and pink. I spent a frigid night sheltering as best I could in a small copse of little pines, shivering with cold, straddling the border, wondering at the width of that invisible line between two countries. A border is nothing but a fiction – only one that holds the power of life and death over countless people. Still shivering, I wrote in the moonlight to pass the time. I was edging ever closer to finishing the story I had tasked myself with writing. When the moon set, it became too dark to write, so I sat there, contemplating the stars overhead to take my mind off the cold. As fatigue finally took over, they seemed to take the shape of an albatross, wings outstretched across the sky, curving from one horizon to the other.

  {154}

  THIS IS WHERE the story ends: at this writing desk, on this wobbly chair, in this damp hotel room, with its smell of countless men, their cigarettes and ointments and sorrows. The naked lightbulb above is buzzing. On the wall in front of me is a framed black-and-white picture of Franco, a balding man with a neat moustache wearing an overcoat with a fur collar. His expression is of calm certainty. Above the iron bedstead hangs a wooden crucifix.

  I woke on the mountaintop this morning in a pre-dawn light and waited for Lisa and the others to meet me. An hour or so later I spotted them in the foothills: Lisa, Henny and Joseph. It was mid-morning by the time they arrived, bringing bread, cheese, sausages and water. After eating, we finally crossed the border into Spain and began the slow descent to Portbou. For the first time in weeks, I felt a stirring of hope. It didn’t last very long. We made our way to the police station, where we were promptly arrested.

  We are late by a single day. Had we arrived yesterday, we would have encountered no obstacle. But only yesterday new orders were received from Madrid: all refugees arriving from France without a French exit visa are to be deported, even if they have transit visas for Spain and Portugal, even if they have entry visas for America, visas that have cost them immeasurable time and effort and money. As of yesterday it doesn’t matter how many stamps there are in your passport if it doesn’t have the one stamp that allows you to leave the country that doesn’t want you.

  Tomorrow we will be escorted back to the border and handed over to the French authorities. All our efforts have been in vain. I will be thrown into a prison cell while my name is cross-referenced against innumerable lists, and eventually I’ll be sent to a camp.

  The others in the group are being held in adjoining rooms. There are two men guarding us in the corridor outside – boys, really, foot soldiers of the Guardia Civil. The mayor has sent the village doctor to check us, although one wonders why, as tomorrow we will be sent to a place where our health can only suffer. The doctor is very young, possibly a recent graduate starting off his career in the provinces. As soon as he entered the room, toting his medicine bag, I sensed a certain contempt
. It was in the sharpness of his movements, the curl of his lips, the curtness of his speech. I was writing when the door swung open without a knock, writing these very words (‘The others in the group are being held,’ and so on). When he saw what I was doing, he asked me in French why I was writing – not what but why.

  ‘Because there is nothing else to do,’ I replied.

  He approached the table and picked up the piece of paper I’d been writing on – this very piece of paper you are reading. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A novel.’

  ‘You’re writing a novel!’ He scanned the words. ‘What’s it about, this novel of yours?’

  I pictured Madeleine’s eyes. ‘I suppose, above all, it’s about love.’

  ‘Love!’ He smiled. ‘A romance novel!’ He shot me a scornful look. ‘You are a foolish man, señor.’ He lowered himself so that his face was directly opposite mine, only inches away. ‘A foolish Jew,’ he added very slowly. I had nothing to say in reply. What can you say to such a person? ‘How can you waste your time like this, given the circumstances? Don’t you realise you’re going to die?’

  ‘What else can I do?’

  ‘Something! Anything!’ he exclaimed, thumping the table. He took a stethoscope from his bag and put its rubber ends in his ears. ‘The time for novels is through, old man. This is a time for action.’

  ‘Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little,’ I recited as I unbuttoned my shirt, ‘and that true reality is only in dreams.’