The Testament (26 page)

I was depressed, we all were. The end was approaching, we were moving toward unspeakable disaster. Nothing remained of that early enthusiasm when the Brigades were forming under the sign of solidarity. The governments of France, Great Britain and the United States had abandoned Spain to its fate, delivered it to its executioners. How was one to explain, without any attempt at justification, such cowardice in otherwise honorable, honest and politically lucid men? We no longer even tried to understand.

Soviet Russia remained faithful, she alone remained faithful. That made us proud and determined. But the die was cast. There was no more chance of winning. We were still fighting, but it was for the sake of honor, not victory.

My depression also had a personal side. Bercu, a Hungarian-Jewish comrade whom I loved like a brother, had disappeared.

I went to see Yasha to solicit his intervention. Yasha was working for the Security services, everybody knew that. In certain quarters he was even thought to be their all-powerful chief.

He was lodged at the Hotel Monopol, renamed Libertad. He received me cordially. Large head, engaging smile,
curly hair, swarthy face: the archetype of the Jewish Communist intellectual, such as one imagined him in the thirties. To put me at ease, he discussed with me—in Yiddish—the general situation, and his views appeared to me less pessimistic than my comrades’ and my own. The Spanish war is only an episode, said he; others will follow. What matters is to have an overview. What matters is that Soviet Russia honored its commitments. The workers, the outcasts, the free men who have been betrayed know that they can rely on her; the rest is not as important, the rest will change and be forgotten. Make a jump, a jump of ten years, and you will see: these painful episodes will no longer be of concern.…

I was sitting, playing with Sheina’s unlit pipe—I enjoyed playing with it; I didn’t smoke. Obliquely I observed my powerful friend. His right hand in his pants pocket, he was striding back and forth in the room as he talked. To listen to me, he stood still. At intervals he took out a cigarette, lit it slowly, savoring the smoke as he closed his left eye, only to open it again as he exhaled.

Knowing him to be very busy and not wishing to take advantage of his generosity, I came directly to the point.

He interrupted me: “I know. I know why you asked to see me.”

“So?”

“So, nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing? Listen, Yasha: Bercu has disappeared and …”

“And nothing, I am telling you.”

“What does it mean, Yasha? That you have nothing to do with it?”

“It means that you’d do well not to get involved.”

“But Bercu is one of ours, an idealist, you know that.…”

In the hall, outside, there was a noise. He stiffened, his
voice turned harsh—hut not the look in his eyes. He continued in French:

“In fact, we have nothing to say to each other, in any case, not on that subject. If Bercu has been arrested by our services, which is possible though not certain, that is their business; they know what they’re doing and do only their duty.…”

He went to the door and opened it; there was nobody.

“Sorry,” he whispered in Yiddish, squeezing my hand. “Your friend is lost. Forget him.”

And, aloud, in French, “Think of afterward, of the total picture. We shall win, Sanchez, we shall win.”

In that hour, I aged ten years. I thought of Bercu: Was he still alive? Was he suffering? What crimes could he have committed to deserve a traitor’s fate? A chilling thought occurred to me: Where was he being held? Perhaps in the very cellars of our Hotel Libertad?

Drained of energy and life, I wandered aimlessly down the Ramblas, losing my way in the twisting alleys where a few months earlier I had walked with Bercu.

Born in a village close to the Romanian border, he had rebelled against his father, a rich merchant. To administer punishments to his son, his father had hired the butcher’s apprentice. Every time the young Bercu came home from school declaring that he would not go back—and this happened frequently—his father, without a word, would send for the butcher’s apprentice and his stick, “It hurt,” my friend told me, “I suffered like a thousand devils in hell; but I bit my lips so as not to show it; I never did show it. This went on for weeks and months. I don’t know whom I hated more: my father who impassively witnessed the canings or the butcher’s helper who, equally indifferent, was breaking my bones for a few coins. One day I met somebody who belonged to the clandestine Party; I followed him and that is where the real surprise was waiting
for me: the butcher’s helper had preceded me there; in fact, he was already chief.…”

Thus it is possible, I discovered, to serve rich and pitiless merchants, to punish defenseless children at their behest—and prepare the liberation of mankind! It is possible to be chastised first by religion and then by Communism. It is possible to be both Bercu’s friend and Yasha’s. Yasha … What would I have done in his place? He knew Bercu; we had spent evenings together, singing, comparing our adventures. Now Bercu was his prisoner. His victim?

On the market square, I saw an anarchist convoy, red and black flags fluttering in the wind, preparing to move toward the front. Antonio, in the first vehicle, motioned to me:

“Sanchez, Sanchez, why so grim?”

“I’ve lost a friend. One? Two.”

“Come with us and you won’t think about it any more,” said Antonio. “You’ll see one of those battles. Why don’t you come?”

“No, thank you. I’m not good at battles, you know that very well.”

In truth, I was tempted by his invitation. I refused because, unexpectedly, Yasha’s image appeared before me, scolding me: You should not have gone with the anarchists, no, you should not have joined them.… Yasha asked me: Why did you follow them? And Antonio, how long have you known him? Why do you consort with our enemies?

“No, Antonio,” I repeated. “I cannot.”

Cowardice? Caution? Let’s not play with words: it was cowardice.

The result: monstrous, all pervasive gloom. The moon sought refuge behind veils. The stars went into mourning. The town became accursed. I could find no place for myself; I felt out of tune with the world, with the body that
linked me to the world. For the first time, I regretted having come to Spain. I would have done better staying in France. Or Palestine. Or Liyanov … Once again, my father’s face loomed before me, as in a dream: Be a good Jew, Paltiel, be a good Jew, my son.… Was I still? I no longer observed the commandments of the Torah, I transgressed its laws, I no longer put on my phylacteries, but … but what? They are in my knapsack, the
tephilin
, I am dragging them from camp to camp. I don’t put them on because … because I am fighting a war. A war, for whose sake? Spain’s? Also for the sake of the Jews, Father, and for you, and for all the oppressed people on earth. But you came to fight in Spain, for Spain, says my father, but it wasn’t my father. Who was it? He had appeared out of nowhere and now he was standing on my left, leaning on the ramparts overlooking the city:

“But you came
to
Spain, to fight
for
Spain,” David Aboulesia’s hoarse voice is telling me in Yiddish. “At least have the courage of your convictions: the real Jew is no longer inside you; he remained in Liyanov. It’s the Communist who came here to shed his name and his past in order to become an international soldier.”

“But,” I protested, “the Jew in me came to join other Jews, they are many in our ranks. Haven’t you noticed them? I did not forsake the Jews by coming to Spain; this is where we met again.”

“What does that prove? That many others did as you did: one hundred candles can go out as quickly as one.”

I glanced at him sideways: Was this David Aboulesia or someone who resembled him? What would he be doing in Spain? Following the Messiah’s trail all the way here, when it has been forbidden to tread this ground since the anathema that followed the expulsion and exodus of 1492? True, there were lives to be saved. Had he come for that? Or was it me he had come to save? Was I then in danger?

“Do you know the history of my illustrious ancestor Don Itzhak Abravanel?” he asked me in his calm, even voice, as though we were sitting peacefully in a House of Study. “He occupied the post of Minister at the court of Portugal toward the end of the fifteenth century. For this Jewish philosopher, intensely religious to boot, to be accepted by the Catholic court of Lisbon, he had to be truly great, and the country had to need his services badly. Came the time of the ordeals: forced to choose between denial of his faith and exile, he chose exile in Spain. Though a Jew, and a refugee at that, he again succeeded in attaining a high position and became Minister to King Ferdinand the Catholic. But in 1492, Don Itzhak Abravanel again confronted the same dilemma: to repudiate his faith and live in glory or leave for another strange country that would permit him to remain faithful. He chose fidelity and exile and moved to Venice where he began work on his messianic writings. Well, this man who had contributed so much to the welfare of Portugal and Spain, you will find practically no trace of him in their history books. His name shines in the history of only one people, his own and ours. This demonstrates clearly that the place a Jew occupies in universal history is determined by his place in Jewish history. In other words, if you believe you must forsake your brothers in order to save mankind, you will save nobody, you will not even save yourself.”

There was something bewildering and unreal in this raucous voice invading the night to tell me of an illustrious character who may well have trod this very same ground and listened to the same nocturnal silence. I felt his hand on my arm—then I felt nothing, not even a presence.

In the distance, a sudden burst of gunfire. Then another. Two executions at dawn? Bercu? In whose memory will he survive? I pondered the question as though it mattered. Actually, nothing mattered any more.

Salud
, David Aboulesia.
Salud
, Don Itzhak Abravanel.
Salud
, Bercu.
Salud
, Sanchez. Paltiel is going his way. He leaves you a poem about Cain and Abel
^*
and their messianic aspirations.

I left Barcelona crying tears of rage.

Shall I ever forget the volunteers’ shameful return to France? Nobody came to welcome us. No flowers, no speeches; no fanfares, no words of praise for the soldiers of international solidarity. After the border guards, the policemen and the customs officers, only the representatives of the various offices of the Préfecture were waiting for us, ready to plunge us back into the bureaucratic reality of the Third Republic: papers, visas, permits, rubber stamps. We were not on their side and they treated us accordingly.

“Since you love it so, your Spain, why didn’t you just stay there?” grumbled a gruff official.

“They’ll make nothing but trouble,” added his colleague. “That’s how they are: they come to a country, make trouble, then they’re off to the next to make more trouble.”

The troublemakers, that was us: some fifty volunteers of the second and third convoys. There was still isolated fighting in free and unhappy Spain, but our Brigades were already dismantled. On Moscow’s orders? That’s what our people were saying and I believed it. Nothing was done or undone without an order from above; and “above” was Moscow, where a pragmatic policy of
Salud, España
was emerging.

The French went home and the Spaniards were packed into dilapidated and macabre internment camps. As for me—still thanks to my precious Romanian passport—I was free to return to Paris.

On the train I was accosted by a stranger who introduced himself as Monsieur Louis. He had been directed by “certain friends” to take care of us, of me. He did not inspire confidence—he really had too much of a “clandestine” look—but I managed not to show him how I felt. After an hour or so, he became talkative:

“We see everything, we know everything. We have our people even inside the police; that fellow who examined your papers, do you think he would have let you pass like that, without difficulty, if he were not one of ours?”

The idiot. And what if I were an informer? I indicated to him that I was exhausted and wanted to sleep. I closed my eyes so as not to see anything, not to hear anything. Not to ask anything, not to refuse anything. The train was whistling, puffing, stopping, moving again; I was dozing, daydreaming. A prisoner of romantic Spain, I fled from it only to return. In love with desperate Spain, I carried it away with me like a handful of sand in my palm or ashes on my forehead.

Two years. Paris had not changed. There are cities that become estranged from themselves in one night. Not Paris. A matter of pride: at her age it becomes crucial not to change.

People were getting ready to leave on their vacations: the sea, the sun. This was the season of the newly won
paid
vacations. There was talk of war, but not too much: the wisdom of government and the strength of armies would surely prevail over the wiles of dictators.

Said the optimists: Why would Hitler declare war on France since in any case the French let him have his way? It is by not having a war that he will win it. The pessimists made similar utterances but with a slight variation: Why would Hitler rush into a war he has already won? As for the realists, who was listening?

From time to time, there was an outburst of anxiety, of malaise, but it didn’t last. The theaters were sold out, there
were lines in front of the movie houses, the street vendors hawked their junk. Elegant avenues, lively streets, inviting store windows, successful novels, fashionable gowns. The grumblers grumbled, the politicians made speeches, the military paraded. The right threatened, the left countered, the women laughed. As for the poor stateless wretches, they were trembling, dreaming of peaceful dawns, of a visa to some inaccessible paradise. The Spanish war had transformed neither morals nor ideas. The Popular Front was already history. The reactionary right barely concealed its triumph: the future would carry it to power.

Nor had Sheina changed—except that she no longer loved me. She had a new tenant, a painter who expressed himself like a poet, and that made him sufficiently attractive to give him shelter and protection and, as she put it, inspiration.