Sepharad (5 page)

The love affair between Milena Jesenka and Franz Kafka is crisscrossed with letters and trains, and in it distance and written words count more than real meetings and caresses. In the spring of 1939, a few days before the German army entered Prague, Milena sent to Willy Haas the letters from Kafka that she had kept, the last of them coming to her sixteen years before, in 1923. On the journey toward the death camp, in the dark stations where the train would stop all night, she must have remembered the emotion and the anguish of those secret journeys of other days, when she was married and lived in Vienna and her lover lived in Prague, and they would meet halfway in the border town of Gmünd, or the first time they met, after several months of exchanging letters, at the station in Vienna. Before they started writing, they saw each other only once, in a café, scarcely noticing each other, and now suddenly he wanted to reclaim from the fuzzy fringes of memory the face of this woman.
I warn you that I cannot remember your face in detail. I remember only your moving away between the small tables in the café: your figure, your dress . . . I still see them.
He has taken the train in Prague, knowing that at the same time she has taken another in Vienna, and his impatience and desire are no stronger than his fear, because he knows that within a few hours he will hold in his arms a physical woman who is scarcely more than a ghost of his imagination and their letters.
Fear is unhappiness,
he wrote to her. He fears that the train will arrive and he will find Milena standing there, her light-colored eyes searching for him, and also fears that she had second thoughts at the last moment and stayed in Vienna with her husband, who does not make her happy, who deceives her with other women, but whom she doesn't want or is unable to leave. He consults his watch, looks at the names of the stations at which the train is stopping, and is tormented by an urgent wish for the hours to race by, to already be there, but also by the fear
of arriving and finding himself alone on the platform of the station in Gmünd. And he fears the impetuous physical presence of Milena, who is much younger and healthier than he, more skillful and more daring in sex.

Unconscious memory is the yeast of imagination. I did not know until this very moment, while I was trying to imagine Franz Kafka's journey on a night express, that I was in fact remembering a journey I myself made when I was twenty-two, one sleepless night on a train to Madrid, on my way to a rendezvous with a woman with light eyes and chestnut hair. I had sent her a telegram minutes before buying my second-class ticket with borrowed money and foolishly leaving everything behind. When I reached the station at dawn, there was no one there to meet me.

What would it be like to approach a border checkpoint and not know if you would be turned back, if the uniformed guards who examined your papers with cruel deliberation, looking up arrogantly to compare the face in the passport photograph with the fear-filled face struggling to seem normal and innocent, would prevent you from crossing to the other side, to the salvation only a few feet away? After meeting Milena for the first time and spending four days with her, Kafka took the express from Vienna to Prague, nervous about getting to his job the next morning, feeling a mixture of happiness and guilt, of sweet intoxication and intolerable amputation, for now he couldn't bear to be alone and who knows how long it would be before he could meet his lover again? When the train stopped at the station in Gmünd, the border police told him that he could not continue on to Prague; one paper was lacking among his numerous documents, an exit visa that could be issued only in Vienna. On the night of March 15, 1938, when Kafka had been dead for almost fourteen years, safe from all worry and guilt, that same express, which left Vienna for Prague at 11:15, was filled with refugees—Jews and leftists, especially—because Hitler had just entered the
city, welcomed by crowds howling like packs of wild beasts, their arms uplifted, shouting his name with the hoarse, collective roar of a raging ocean, yelling
Heil
to the Führer and to the Reich, clamoring for the annihilation of the Jews. Uniformed Austrian Nazis boarded the Prague express at intermediate stations and looted the baggage of the refugees, whom they beat and subjected to insults and curses. Many passengers had no papers, and at the border station the Czech guards prevented them from continuing. Some leaped from the train and fled across the fields, hoping to cross the border in the shelter of night.

What would it be like to arrive by night at the coast of an unfamiliar country, to jump into the water from a boat in which you have crossed the ocean in darkness, hoping to leave the coast far behind even as your feet are sinking into the sand? A man alone, with no documents, no money, who has come from the horror of illness and slaughter in Africa, from the heart of darkness, who knows no word of the language of the country to which he's come, who throws himself to the ground and crouches in a ditch when he sees the headlights of a car, maybe the police, coming toward him.

 

IT SEEMS WE ENJOY
reading travel books more when we are traveling. At the beginning of the summer of 1976, after wrapping up my courses, I took a train from Granada and during the trip read Proust's account of a journey to Vienna in
Remembrance of Things Past.
Two years later, on a September evening, I went to Venice for the first time, and remembered Proust and his painful propensity for disillusionment as I visited places I had wanted so long to see. Talking with Francisco Ayala about the pleasure of reading Proust, I discovered that he, too, connected it with the simultaneous pleasure of a journey. In nineteen forty-something, when my friend was living in exile in Buenos Aires, he taught at the provincial University of Rosario. He traveled once a week,
first by train to Santa Fe, then in a bus that ran along the banks of the Paraná. He always carried a volume of Proust, and it seemed to him that reading Proust now was even more delicious than the first time, because when he looked up, he saw vistas from the other side of the world, was instantly whisked from the streets of Paris in 1900 and from the cloudy beaches of Normandy to the immense uninhabited spaces of South America he was passing through by train and bus. Suddenly the book was his only tie with his previous life, with a Spain lost to him, a Spain he might never return to, and a Europe that still had not emerged from the cataclysm of war. He was reading Proust on a bus traveling along the sealike vastness of the Paraná, and the volume he held in his hands was the same he'd read so often on streetcars in Madrid.

Once, at one of the stops, he looked up and saw a white-haired old man who had just got on, wearing a worn overcoat and carrying an equally worn briefcase. He was struck by his air of melancholy and poverty; the face reflected illness and exhaustion, the face of an old man whom the years had not spared life's bitterest dregs. In an instant of shock, disbelief, and embarrassed compassion, he recognized in this old man riding a bus in a remote town in Argentina a man who had once been president of the Spanish Republic: Don Niceto Alcalá Zamora. Afraid that Alcalá might recognize him as well, he turned his face toward the window and buried himself in the book. When he looked up again, after the next stop, the man was no longer on the bus.

 

ON A JOURNEY YOU HEAR
a story or by chance find a book that sends out ripples of concentric rings that affect succeeding discoveries. Once on a train to Seville, at a time when I was very much in love with a woman who fled from me when I most desired her and who pursued me when I tried to break away, I was reading
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
and bestowed on Giorgio Bassani's beautiful and ungovernable Jewish heroine, Micol, the features of the woman I loved. The final failure of the novel's protagonist sadly anticipated mine, which I saw with a clearsightedness I wouldn't have been capable of on my own.

I remember a cheap, dog-eared copy of Herodotus's
Histories
that I found in a street stall in New York, and also Captain John Franklin's journal of his trek to the North Pole that I had leafed through by chance in a secondhand bookshop and then read ravenously in a London hotel, a narrow, high-ceilinged bedroom of perverse geometry and a dressing room scarcely larger than an armoire but writhing with angles of expressionist decor. In 1989, having arrived in Buenos Aires during the southern hemisphere's autumn, I spent hours lying on the bed in my room listening to the rain drumming against the windows, the same rain that prevented me from going outside to walk the streets I wanted so badly to explore. For hours, to offset the claustrophobia of my confinement, I read the first book I had discovered by Bruce Chatwin,
In Patagonia.
Now I know that precisely during the time I was reading Chatwin's book, the author was dying of an illness whose name he did not want to divulge to anyone. A rare infection contracted in Central Asia through food or an insect bite, his friends said, to conceal his disgrace and avoid speaking the word that was already akin to the sore that centuries ago announced the horror of the plague.

So I read Chatwin in Buenos Aires as he was dying in London. My journey through Argentina was thus part truth and part literature, because as I read I was traveling to the great desolate spaces of the south, though my itinerary had ended in the nation's capital, in the room of a hotel I seldom left because of the rain. What a rest for the soul, to be far from everything, completely isolated, like a monk in his cell, a cell with every comfort: a firm bed, a telephone within reach, a remote control for the television. The rain absolved me from the exhausting obligation of
touring and provided the perfect excuse for spending hours doing nothing, lying or half sitting propped up on two pillows, with a book in my hands that told of a journey to the ends of the earth and in which other, much older journeys were recalled: that of Charles Darwin in the large sailing ship
Beagle,
that of the Patagonian Indian who traveled with Darwin to England, learned English and English ways, visited Queen Victoria, and after a few years returned to his southern clime and to the primitive life he had left, now forever an alien wherever he lived.

 

IN COPENHAGEN,
a Danish woman of French and Sephardic heritage told me of a journey she had taken as a child with her mother through recently liberated France, toward the end of autumn 1944. I met her at a luncheon in the Writer's Club, which was a palace with double doors, marble columns, and ceilings with gilded garlands and allegorical paintings. At a window I watched as one of the tall ships passed, looking as if it were gliding down a street: it sailed along one of the canals that lead deep into the city and suddenly give a street corner the surprise perspective of a port.

That was early in September, about eight years ago. I had spent a couple of days wandering the city, and on the third an editor friend invited me to lunch. My memory is filled with cities that have greatly pleased me but that I visited only once. Of Copenhagen I remember especially images from my first walk. I left the hotel and started walking at random, and soon I came upon an oval plaza circled with palaces and columns; in the center was the bronze statue of a horse, the color bronze acquires because of humidity and lichen, a grayish green like the sky or like the marble of the palace I was told was once the Royal Palace.

In all the cold and baroque space of that plaza cut through from time to time by a solitary car (as I heard the sound of the motor, I heard also the whisper of tires on the cobblestones) there
was no human presence other than mine and that of a soldier in the red coat and high furry shako of a hussar who was unenthusiastically standing guard with a gun over his shoulder, a gun with a bayonet as anachronistic as his uniform.

Not knowing which way to go, I let the streets lead me, as I let myself be led by a trail in the country. Across from the bronze horseman began a long, straight street that dead-ended at a dome, also verdigris bronze, of a church adorned with golden letters in Latin and a variety of statues of saints, warriors, and individuals dressed in frock coats along the cornices. The church resembled those baroque churches of Rome, one just like another, that give the unpleasant effect of being branch offices of something, maybe the Vatican or the financial offices of God's grace.

A statue ensconced on that facade undoubtedly represented Søren Kierkegaard. Stooped over, as if watching something below, hands behind his back, he did not have that attitude of elevation or of definitive immobility typical of statues. After death, after a century and a half of official immortality, of rubbing elbows with all those solemn heroes, saints, generals, and tribunes of the historic pantheon of Denmark, Kierkegaard—that is, his statue—still had a transient, temporary, restless demeanor, a look of uneasiness about walking alone through a closed and hostile city, casting sidelong glances at people he scorned and who scorned him still more, not only for his hump and large head but for the incomprehensible extravagance of his writings, his fervent biblical faith. He was as exiled and stateless in his native city as if he had been forced to live on the other side of the world.

I looked for the way back to the hotel. In less than an hour my editor—whom in truth I scarcely knew—would be coming to pick me up. On one long, bourgeois street of clothing and antique shops I saw a tiled roof projecting rather absurdly from a whitewashed or painted wall in which there was a wooden door with metal hinges and doorknocker and a window grill filled with
geraniums. I, who on that Saturday afternoon had felt so far from everything on my walk through the empty streets of Copenhagen, had found a Spanish oasis called Pepe's Bar.

 

A WOMAN WAS SEATED
beside me at a large oval table in the Writer's Club. As has happened other times, the luncheon was in my honor, but no one was paying much attention to me. Before each of us was a card with a name. The woman's name was an enigma and a promise: Camille Pedersen-Safra. I can't resist the attraction of names. She told me she'd been born in France, into a Jewish family of Spanish descent. Pedersen was her married name. While the other guests were laughing and heatedly talking, relieved at not having to make conversation with a stranger they knew nothing about, she told me that she and her mother escaped from France on the eve of the fall of Paris, in the great exodus of June 1940. They had returned to that country only once, in the autumn of 1944, and both realized that after only those few years they no longer belonged to the country of their birth, from which they would have been deported to the death camps had they not escaped in time, and to show their gratitude they had become Danish citizens. Denmark, too, was occupied by the Germans and subjected to the same anti-Jewish laws as those of France, but unlike the French Vichy government the Danish authorities did not collaborate in isolating and deporting Jews, did not even apply the law making them wear a yellow star.