Sepharad (8 page)

Three weeks later, on March 8, 1937, Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, who were on a trip to Moscow, were received by Stalin in a large office in the Kremlin. María Teresa León remembered him as bent over and smiling.
He had short little teeth, as if his pipe had worn them away.
They talked about the war in Spain and about Soviet aid to the Republic. On one wall was a large map of Spain, with pins and little flags indicating the positions of the armies. On another, a map of Madrid. Stalin asked María Teresa León if it would bother her if he lit his pipe. He talked with them for more than two hours, promising them weapons, planes, military instructors.
He smiled at us the way you smile at children you want to encourage.
Many years later, far from Spain, lost in the duration and distance of exile, María Teresa León remembered Stalin with a kind of distant tenderness.
To us he seemed slim and sad, burdened by something, maybe by his fate.

 

WHEN THEY BEGAN
the deportation of Jews from Dresden, Professor Klemperer felt temporarily safe because he was married to an Aryan woman.
For the moment, I'm safe. As safe as someone can be on the gallows with a rope around his neck. Any day now a new law can kick the platform from under my feet, and then I'm a
hanged man.
Men came to get Greta Buber-Neumann on June 19, 1938, but when they showed her the arrest warrant, she pointed out that it bore a date that was nine months old, October 1937. It must have been mislaid in all the red tape of the interrogators and murderers, the intellectuals with round eyeglasses and exquisite ideas about literature and the need to purify the Revolution with blood. Or maybe someone had deliberately kept it in a desk drawer, examining it day after day at an office desk the way you study a valuable manuscript, in an office with the noise of typewriters and heavy doors and locks. Someone decided to prolong for a year the day-and-night torture of the German woman who went from jail to jail in Moscow, vainly seeking news of her husband, and who kept a suitcase in her small, icy room, packed with a few things she needed for the moment she was arrested and shipped to Siberia. She never learned how or when Heinz Neumann died. With a letter and a packet of food under her arm, she went to Moscow in the midst of the tumultuous preparations for May Day, keeping away from the crowd as if she had the plague or leprosy, a foreign woman who didn't speak Russian well and who couldn't trust anyone, because her former comrades were either arrested or dead or had turned their backs on her. A figure among the throngs, not wanting to see the red flags or the posters strung above the streets or hear the music thundering over the loudspeakers, the heroic march from
Aida,
she recalled years later, and Strauss waltzes. On April 30, 1937, Greta Buber-Neumann walks to Lubyanka Prison, hoping to find her husband, who was arrested three days before, and everywhere she sees portraits of Stalin, in the shopwindows, on the fronts of houses, on movie theater doors, portraits encircled with flower garlands or red flags bearing the hammer and sickle. When she passes a group of people who have stopped to watch as workmen with pulleys and ropes raise an enormous portrait of Stalin that covers the entire front of a building, Greta turns away and presses
harder against her belly the package of food and clothing that she may never be able to deliver.
If only I could never see that face again.
In the Opera House square they have just raised a wooden statue of Stalin—more than ten meters tall and mounted on a pedestal encircled with red flags: Stalin, walking energetically in a soldier's greatcoat and cap. What would you do if you were that woman lost in a vast foreign and hostile city, if they had taken away your passport and the temporary ID that classified you as an official of the Comintern, if they had thrown you out of your job and were about to throw you out of the room you shared with your husband, a room you still hadn't straightened after the search, still hadn't made the bed where you spent your last night with him, not sleeping for a minute, still hadn't picked up the books they threw on the floor and then stomped on or the stuffing from the mattress they expertly gutted looking for hidden documents, weapons, proof? You wait in the room, sitting on the unmade bed, stupefied, hearing steps in the hotel corridor, watching as the gray light of the afternoon slips toward darkness. They will come for you too, and you even wish they would hurry, you have your suitcase packed, or the bundle you will take with you, but days go by, weeks, months, and nothing happens, except that you've become invisible, no one looks you in the eye, and when you stand in line in the police stations and prisons beside the relatives of other prisoners and your turn comes, they rudely close the little window in your face because it's late. They won't tell you whether or not your husband is locked up in there, or pretend they don't understand the words you speak in Russian, words you have prepared so carefully, repeating them as you walk down the street like a crazy woman talking to herself. Ever since the Germans entered Prague, Milena Jesenska knew that sooner or later they would come looking for her, but she didn't hide, didn't stop writing in newspapers, she only took a few precautions; she sent her ten-year-old daughter to spend a while with friends, and she
asked someone in whom she had absolute faith, the writer Willy Haas, to keep for her the letters from Franz Kafka.

In a distant park, one you reach after a long ride in a streetcar, almost on the outskirts of Moscow, Greta Buber-Neumann makes a date to meet an old friend, someone as frightened as she, but nonetheless loyal. You are that woman who jumps from a moving streetcar and turns to see if anyone is following, then takes another streetcar, and when she gets off, following a circuitous route, arrives at a suburban park bathed in the afternoon light. There will be people around, old men with canes and overcoats and leather caps, mothers holding the hands of children swathed in mufflers and heavy coats. Greta and her friend see one another from a distance but do not approach one another until they are sure no one is following. “Can't we get away somehow?” he asks. “Do we have to have our throats cut like rabbits? How have we been able to accept all this for years without questioning it, without opening our eyes? Now we have to pay for our blind faith.”

The next time, the man doesn't come. Greta waits until nightfall, then goes back to her room without bothering to check whether she's being followed. She imagines, with sadness, almost with sweetness, that her friend has managed to escape.

One night in January 1938, the knock at the door finally comes. They haven't come to take her away, however, only to confiscate the last belongings of the renegade Heinz Neumann. Uniformed police collect the few books Greta hasn't sold for a pittance in order to buy food, and some of her husband's old shoes, and as they leave they hand her a receipt. Someone tells her that the friend she used to meet in the park was arrested as he tried to board a train for the Crimea.

They came one morning very early, on July 19, and when she realized that they had finally come for her, she felt only a kind of relief. They drove her to Lubyanka Prison in the backseat of a small black van, sitting between two men in sky-blue uniforms
who didn't look at her or speak a word. This time her knees didn't tremble, and at her feet was the suitcase she'd kept packed for so long. She remembered the last thing she saw in a Moscow street before the van drove through the prison gates: a luminous clock glowing red in the early dawn.

On July 12, Professor Klemperer refers in his diary to some friends who left Germany and found work in the United States or England. But how do you leave when you don't have anything? He, an old man with a sick wife, with no knowledge of any foreign language, with no practical skill, how do you leave the house you've finally managed to build, the land Eva has almost made into a garden?
We have stayed here, in shame and penury, as if buried alive, buried up to our necks, waiting day after day for the last spadefuls of dirt.

STARTLED AWAKE,
I am stiff with cold, and I don't know where I am, even who I am. For a few seconds, I have been a blaze of pure consciousness, without identity, without place, without time, only the waking and the sensation of cold, the darkness in which I'm lying curled up, wrapped in the sheltering warmth of my own body, on my side, hands between my legs and knees up against my chest, my feet icy despite the boots and wool socks, my fingertips numb, my joints so stiff that if I try to move, I may not be able.

There's something more than the cold and the darkness like the bottom of a well, like a breath of moist stone and frozen, plowed earth. The smell of manure too, manure mixed with mud, an ocean of mud and manure that swallows up military boots, horses' hooves, the wheels and tracks of war machines. What has woken me is a sense of danger, a reflection of alarm so powerful that in one second it dissipated all the weight of sleep. Quicker than my still groggy consciousness, my right hand feels beneath the blankets in search of the gun. The Spanish wool gloves, the harsh sleeve of the gray military tunic stained with dry mud, the feel of the greatcoat I'm using as a pillow and of the mattress of
damp straw on which I was sleeping: each is a feature added to my identity, to this persona that nevertheless observes from without, someone groping among rough fabrics for the cold metal of a Luger. But my whole arm feels heavy as lead, still paralyzed by sleep and cold, and an automatic instinct of caution warns me that I mustn't make a sound. I hold my breath, hoping to hear something, a whisper that barely scratches the silence. I want to evaporate in the darkness, to lie as motionless as those insects whose defense mechanism is to be mistaken for a blade of grass or a dry leaf.

It's the danger that has reminded him of who and where he is. Danger, not fear. He never feels fear, just as he cannot remember ever having felt envy. He feels the cold, the hunger, the exhaustion of brutal marches, the desperation of always sinking in endless mud—from the beginning of autumn, when the rains came—in a sea of mire and manure that swamps everything: men, animals, machines, dead and living.

A second ago it was barely a spark of alarm in the void of darkness, as anonymous as the tip of a cigarette glowing for an instant beyond the mud and the no-man's-land—in the vast nothingness of the plain obliterated by mud, which in a few weeks will become a desert field of snow. Now he knows, remembers. In old Spanish to remember means to wake up. The professor of literature is lecturing, walking from one side to the other on a dais dusty with chalk and echoing hollowly beneath his feet. He wears round eyeglasses, a rumpled suit, and draws from a dangling cigarette as he speaks passionately of Jorge Manrique and recites long sections of his poetry. He doesn't know that within a few months he will be shot, his nearsighted eyes squinting in the headlights of a truck. He remembers “the sleeping soul” and thinks of his favorite student in the Instituto Cardenal Cisneros in Madrid. His mind brightens, and he wakes completely. Memory explodes in him as if he had walked into a dark room where objects begin to take shape, the outlines of furniture and windows. His animal instinct for danger makes him listen again for the sound that woke him. A staccato, metallic sound, insignificant to anyone who doesn't know it, but unmistakable: the whisper of a gun lightly brushing against something, a rifle against the clothing on a shoulder. He raises his head a little and sees a ray of light beneath the door, between the chinks of the badly joined boards that separate the lean-to where he's sleeping from the main room of the hut. He could have chosen to sleep there, the German officer in charge of billeting told him, he'd be near the fire and wouldn't have to endure the stench of the manure. When he arrived the first night, the Russian woman and her child had already retired to the lean-to, or, more accurately, had hidden in it, leaving the only bed for him. Arms about each other, mother and child become a single mound of rags, two pairs of eyes frightened and shining in the light of the flashlight. He told them in German to come out, that they didn't have anything to fear, he told them using signs that he didn't want the bed, that they should take it. The woman shook her head, murmured in Russian, cuddled her child, the two of them rocking back and forth. The child had thin blond hair and sunken cheeks, and large blue circles smudged the transparent skin beneath his eyes.

But the light filtering from beyond the door doesn't come from a fire or candle. It's a flashlight being turned on and off; he can hear the click of the switch, which someone is sliding very quietly: not the woman, because he is sure she doesn't have a flashlight, she didn't even have candles until he brought her a handful from the commissary, or matches to light the fire. There was nothing at all in the straw-thatched log hut stranded in the midst of the mud and the chaos of the roads to the front, untouched by the disaster, nothing but the large iron bed that ended up there
through God only knows what whim of fate, the bed that he'd refused to sleep in, despite instructions from the officer in charge of billeting.

He hears voices in the hut, barely whispers, but men's voices, not the woman's or the child's. Footsteps too, boots, which he doesn't exactly hear but rather feels as vibration on the ground where he's lying. The flashlight is turned on again, and again he hears the sound of a rifle against cloth or a leather belt—specifically, the sound of the ring that fastens the sling to the rifle butt. Now the beam is turned in his direction, and the straw and the nest of blankets and greatcoat in which he's lying are striped by threads of light coming through the cracks. Something blocks the light, a body brushing against the planks of the door. It's the woman, he's sure; he recognizes her voice, even though she is speaking very quietly, repeating one of the few words of Russian he's learned.
Niet.

Now he guesses, understands, but still isn't afraid. Russian guerrillas. They operate behind our lines, sabotage installations, execute and hang from telegraph poles known collaborators with the Germans. They make raids at night, and at dawn there is no trace of them except for the corpse of someone they've hanged or strangled in silence. They don't run, they vanish in the darkness, in the limitless expanse of plain and woods, a space that no army can encompass or conquer.