Sepharad (17 page)

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?

During nights when I lay in the darkness, waiting in vain to fall asleep, I have imagined the sleepless hours of Willi Münzenberg, the insomniac who couldn't sleep when he began to understand that the time of his power and pride had come to an end,
and that all he had before him was running without hope of respite or possibility of safe harbor and finally dying like a dog, a hunted and sacrificed animal, just as so many friends of his friends had died, former comrades, Bolshevik heroes transformed overnight into criminals and traitors, into insects that must be crushed, according to the harangues of the drunken and demented prosecutors of the Moscow trials. Executed like a dog, like Zinoviev or Bukharin, like his friend and brother-in-law Heinz Neumann, director of the German Communist Party, who was living as a refugee or trapped in Moscow and who died in 1937, perhaps shot in the head, as unarmed and surprised before his executioners as another accused man, Josef K., whom Franz Kafka invented during the feverish insomnia of tuberculosis, unaware how prophetic he was. But it has never been ascertained exactly how Neumann died, how many weeks or months he was tortured, or where his body was buried.

In the death camp of Ravensbrück, Neumann's widow listened to stories her friend Milena Jesenska told her about Kafka. During many sleepless nights, Babette Gross lived minute by minute the torture of not knowing whether her husband was dead or in one of Stalin's prisons or in a German concentration camp. Years later, when she finally was told the truth, she imagined his hanged body in a forest, swinging from a tree branch, swaying back and forth until the branch or the rope broke and his body fell to the ground to rot without anyone's finding it, and all that long time she couldn't sleep, wondering whether she should or shouldn't think of him as a dead man. With autumn, falling leaves began to cover him.

You were sleeping beside me, and I was imagining Willi Münzenberg smoking in the dark as he listened to the quiet breathing of his wife, Babette, a stylish bourgeois blond, daughter of a Prussian beer magnate, an undoubting Communist in the early twenties, who lived much longer—nearly half a century—than
he, an ancient woman who on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall received an American historian and whispered into a tape recorder stories of a vanished time and world, images of the night the Reichstag burned, of the first parades of the Brownshirts through German cities, and of Moscow in November 1936, when she and her husband waited for days in a hotel room for someone to come for them, waited to be called and given a day and an hour for an appointment with Stalin, a call that never came, until they heard pounding at the door: the men who had come to arrest them.

There are people who have seen these things: none of it has sunk into the absolute oblivion that claims events and human beings when the last person to witness them, the last person to hear a certain voice or meet a certain pair of eyes, dies.

I know a woman who wandered lost through Moscow the morning Stalin's death was announced. Eight months pregnant, she went back home because she was afraid that in the throng of people in the streets the creature kicking in her womb would be crushed. As I speak with her, I feel the vertigo I would feel crossing a soaring bridge of time, almost as if I were experiencing the reality she has seen, a reality that would be no more than a description in a book for me if I hadn't met her. I know a man who won an Iron Cross in the battle of Leningrad, and when I was very young I shook the hand of another whose pale, skinny forearm bore the tattooed identification number of a prisoner in Dachau. I have spoken with someone who at the age of six clung to his mother in a cellar in Madrid, terrified of the air-raid sirens, and of the airplanes and exploding bombs, and at ten he was interned in a barracks in Mauthausen. That man was small, polite, and detached; his name was half Spanish, half French, though he didn't really belong to either country. The black hair, combed straight back, the strong features and coppery face were Spanish, but his behavior and language were as French as those of any of
the writers talking and drinking at that literary cocktail party in Paris where we met briefly, the beginning of my friendship with Michel del Castillo.

By chance, the way you meet a stranger at a party, I met Willi Münzenberg in a book I'd been sent. Begun half-heartedly, it turned into my insomnia. At some moment in the reading, without my knowing, there came a shift in attitude, and the person who had been nothing more than a name, an obscure and minor character, struck me as a powerful presence, someone intimately related to me, to the things that matter most to me, to my deepest being. You are in large part what others know, or think they know, about you, what they see when they look at you; but who are you when you're alone in the dark and can't sleep and your inert body is anchored to the bed and your untrammeled imagination confronts the intolerably slow pace of time? You don't know the hour but don't want to turn on the light and wake the person sleeping beside you; it might be the middle of the night or near the first light of dawn.

 

FROM AMONG THE GHOSTS
of the living and the dead rises the specter of Münzenberg. He was with me that sleepless night, and he has returned often since; unexpectedly, over the years, I find him in the pages of other books, or he comes to me in my thoughts. All his life was a game between show and invisibility, between veiled power and the weightless splendor of appearances, and in the end he
was
invisible, erased from history by the same powerful people he served so well, the ones who in early June of 1940 hanged him from a tree in a forest in France.

Just yesterday I discovered that I had an excellent photograph of him. I found it in the second volume of Arthur Koestler's autobiography,
Invisible Writing,
published in London in 1954. Coincidences suddenly fall into place: I had bought that volume with the red binding and coarse yellow paper in a secondhand
bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, one winter day in 1993. The store was in a red wooden building that reminded me a little of a cabin or a barn, at the edge of a snowy woods. One day as I flipped through the book, looking for the publication date, I saw something I'd never noticed: on the inside cover was an illegible signature, and beside that a place and date: Oslo, January 1959.

I hadn't remembered the photograph either, which has that chiaroscuro of portraits from the thirties. Münzenberg looks directly into the viewer's eyes, with arrogance and firmness, perhaps with a hint of loss and anticipated desperation, and with the sadness witnesses to some terrible truth exhibit in photographs. He is a strong man, rough, but not vulgar, with a thick, strong neck and broad shoulders, slightly lifted chin, shrewd eyes ringed with fatigue, broad brow, carelessly combed hair, a sign either of constant activity or the beginnings of neglect. He is dressed in a formal but very modern mode: suit jacket with a fountain pen in the upper pocket, vest, tie, and a shirt with an attached collar. Koestler says his face had the solid simplicity of a wood sculpture, but was lightened by an open and friendly expression. Koestler worked on behalf of Münzenberg in Paris during the period the photograph was taken: a short man, squarely built, robust, with the look of a small-town cobbler, but one who nevertheless projected such an hypnotic air of authority that Koestler saw bankers, diplomats, and Austrian dukes bow before him with the obedience of schoolboys.

Münzenberg was born in 1889 to a poor family in a proletarian suburb of Berlin. His father was a brutal, drunken tavern keeper who blew his head off while cleaning his shotgun. At sixteen Münzenberg was working in a shoe factory and taking advantage of the educational activities of the unions. He had always shown intelligence and had a talent for organization as well as an energy that instead of being depleted by controversy and hard
work seemed to thrive on them. To avoid serving in an army involved in a war whose internationalist principles he repudiated, he escaped to Switzerland, where in the refugee circles of Bern he met Trotsky, who was immediately taken with his intelligence, his revolutionary passion, and his organizational skills. Trotsky introduced him to Lenin, and soon Münzenberg was part of Lenin's most loyal inner circle. One author reports that he was one of the Bolsheviks who traveled to Russia with Lenin in a sealed railroad car on the eve of the October Revolution.
Dear friend,
it's said he told Lenin,
you will die of your convictions.

But he was always a little different from his Communist comrades. There was something excessive about him, even when he was most orthodox. He liked the good life, and having been born into and lived in poverty, he had an appetite for grand hotels, expensive suits, and luxury automobiles. He was made of the same stuff as the great American plutocrats who rose out of nothing, energetic impresarios of railroads or coal mines or steel who had grown rich because of their clear vision and villainy, but especially because of the compelling force of a practical intelligence joined with a resolute and merciless will. Those who knew Münzenberg say that had he chosen to serve capitalism instead of communism, he would have been a Hearst, a Morgan, or a Frick, one of those colossal entrepreneurs never satisfied by any possession, no matter how excessive, and who never lose their rough edges; age or power or wealth do not slow their ardor for acquiring, and despite boundless wealth, they remain jovial boors.

During the first years of the Soviet Revolution, when Lenin, hallucinating on the country estates of the Kremlin, intoxicated by his own fanaticism, surrounded with telephones and lackeys, still imagined that at any minute all Europe would explode in the flames of proletarian uprisings, Münzenberg understood that world revolution would not happen immediately, if ever, and that
communism would spread in the West only in an oblique and gradual way—not with the loud, crude, and monotonous propaganda that pleased the Soviets but, rather, through seemingly neutral and apolitical causes and with the complicity, in great part unwitting, of intellectuals of great prestige, unaffiliated celebrities who would sign manifestos promoting peace, culture, and goodwill among nations.