Sepharad (40 page)

The person who hasn't lived the experience demands details that mean nothing to the true narrator: my friend speaks of the cold and of the blocks of ice floating down the river, but my imagination adds the hour and the evening light, which is the same as the light in the street as we left the restaurant, and I also added the German officers' heavy gray overcoats with the broad lapels, as well as the dissimilar build of the two men—the Spaniard a little emaciated, at least in comparison with the captain who loved the clarinet, but both alike in the black gloves, black-visored caps, and collars turned up against the cold, talking about music, remembering sad passages from Brahms and Mozart and snappy George Gershwin tunes played by Benny Goodman's orchestra, which had not been heard for years on German radio.

 

“
THEN I SAW SOMETHING
I've never forgotten.” My friend puts down his knife and fork, takes a sip of wine with a lively and slightly furtive gesture, so rare in a man of eighty, that suggests many tasks ahead in life, things to learn, books to review for the specialized journals of his profession, in which he is internationally eminent, appointments, travels abroad. As he speaks now, his small eyes peer at me behind heavy white eyebrows and wrinkled eyelids, but he doesn't seem to see me, he's not in the same place and time that I am, a restaurant in Madrid loud with voices and telephones. “I saw a large group of people that spanned the road from side to side coming toward us, men only, some almost children and others so old they stumbled as they walked and leaned on one another. They came in rows, close together, in formation,
none speaking, heads bowed, as we used to see in the funerals that wound through the narrow streets of our villages, and the men in the lead held in front of them a horizontal pole like the barrier at a border post, with a tangle of barbed wire hanging from it that must have ripped their legs as they walked. You could hear their footsteps, the wire dragging the ground, and the swish of the guards' rifles brushing against their uniforms. The German and I pulled to one side of the road, where we watched. There were hundreds of men, guarded by a few SS soldiers, and in every fifth or sixth row was another bar with barbed wire, perhaps to entangle anyone who broke formation and tried to escape. I had never seen such thin, pale faces, not even on Russian prisoners, or the way those men had of walking, keeping time but dragging their feet, shoulders hunched, staring at the ground. I remember one old man with a long white beard, but I especially remember a young man in the front row, at the center, very tall, with sallow skin and a dead face, he wore an ankle-length overcoat, the kind in style then, and a navy-blue cap. I can see him as clearly as I'm seeing you now, his pince-nez glasses and his face with its dark beard, not because it was several days since he shaved but because the beard was thick and made even darker by his pallor. He was the only one to lift his head a little, though not much, and he stared at me as he passed, turning his long neck with its prominent Adam's apple, just at me, not the German. He turned and kept looking between the bowed heads of the other men, as if trying to say something with his eyes, which seemed abnormally large in such a thin face.”

The sound of marching feet blended into the sound of the river as the column of prisoners moved on. The two men stood in silence, the German captain and the Spaniard recently promoted to lieutenant, both large in their gray overcoats and like brothers in their silver caps with the black visors. The light of the
sun had disappeared, and the cold was damper and more intense. Deep in the woods, beyond the road, night would be advancing, as it did in some of the narrow streets in the center of Madrid, where the sun still shone on the windows of the tallest buildings in the pure icy blue of November.

My friend asked the German who those men were. The German was both surprised and amused at the innocence of the young officer so new to the war, the unpolished Spaniard still not entirely worthy of being admitted into their superior German brotherhood despite the purity of his accent, his bravery at the front, and his devotion to Brahms.
Juden!
the German said, and his face took on a strange expression, as if he were sharing a lewd secret or piece of barracks humor. My friend imitates the tone and the look of sarcasm and scorn on the face of the German, who winked and nudged him with his elbow.

“I didn't know anything then, but worst of all was my refusal to know, to see what was before my eyes. I had enlisted in the Blue Division because I believed everything they told us, I don't want to hide anything or try to excuse myself, I thought that Germany was civilization and Russia barbarism, the steppes of Asia from which all the invading hordes of Europe had come for centuries. Ortega said Germany was the West, and we believed him. Germany was the music that touched me so deeply, the tongue of poetry and philosophy, law and science. You can't know the passion with which I had studied German in Madrid, before our war, how vain I was when the Germans I interpreted for in Russia praised my accent. But that German word,
Juden,
was jarring, a discordant warning of something I had not heard until then, although surely I had heard it many times, I will not say what many said later: that they didn't know, that they never saw or heard anything. We didn't know because we weren't of a mind to know. You can make an effort not to know, close your
eyes and not want to open them, but once they're open, what the eyes have seen cannot be erased.”

 

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.