Sepharad (41 page)

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.

But I don't say anything, I just listen while he talks about how the legs get weak after a certain age and how names become
hard to recollect because of the deterioration of the neurotransmitters. When we say good-bye at the door of the modern building where he lives (maybe the one before it was destroyed in the bombardments), I see him from behind as he walks through the entry hall toward the elevator, bent and diligent, with only a hint of hesitation in his movements. If she were alive, if she is alive, the woman my friend met and lost in the city called Narva, she would be ninety. And if she was saved and is still alive somewhere, I wonder if she remembers, now, tonight, as I write these words, the young lieutenant she danced with one January night in 1943.

I SAT QUIETLY, WAITING,
killing time, observing things from my window for hours on end, in an office where it might be mid-morning before someone came in—an emissary from the outside world, usually a second- or third-rate artist, a poet from the provinces trying to set up a reading or get a subvention to publish a book of poems, people who knocked timidly at the door and who might sit for hours in the small reception room, waiting for a contract or a payment, a chance for an interview, to deliver a badly photocopied résumé that somehow, through my hands, might reach the manager I worked for, the man who made the decisions, judgments that were a long time coming, bogged down in the archaic lassitude of the administration, or held up by negligence or carelessness: the manager didn't look at the documents I put on his desk, or I forgot to put them there. Sloth, isolation, estrangement, people always going out of focus, less real than the people in my mind or memories, in the fog between the invented and the remembered. In a letter Kafka wrote, I recognized the symptoms of my illness: ennui.
I was like a dead man, having no desire to communicate, as if I did not belong to this world or any other; as if during all the years that led to this moment I had acted
mechanically, done only what was required of me, while waiting for a voice that would call out to me.

I wrote letters, waited for letters, and when one came, I answered it hastily, then let a few days go by before I resumed my attitude of waiting, because it would be at least two weeks before the next letter arrived, that is, if it wasn't delayed like the decisions awaited by the applicants in the reception room of my office. I waited in both expectation and fear, but also out of mere habit, and if I saw the striped edge of an air-mail envelope among the letters and documents my assistant brought every morning, I would feel a senseless surge of renewed hope.

I worked alone, not in the main administration building but on one of the floors rented for new offices, temporary quarters that always had something furtive about them and often lacked an official seal on the door. There might be just an improvised sign at the end of a narrow corridor or steep stairway, a location close to central headquarters but behind it, on a little street with old taverns, dark hangouts for drunks, and shops that not many years back sold condoms and dirty magazines under the counter. Those streets were so narrow the sun didn't reach them, and there was always the hint of a sewer, and dank shadows gathered at the corners that faced the remnant of what once had been the red-light district, in other days a labyrinth called La Manigua. Now the last survivors occasionally emerged from those alleyways, old women, fat and heavily made up, or a few young pale ones hooked on heroin, with scuffed high heels and a cigarette stuck into the red stain of a mouth, specters loitering in lugubrious arcades.