Sepharad (31 page)

They too moved away, habitual one day and the next gone forever, and the man on the balcony saw that the apartment across from him was empty again, and witnessed the arrival of other tenants, months or years later, it didn't matter, because for him life was a slow endurance with little modification. Months or years later, we met a former neighbor who was still living in the barrio. We talked about the days that suddenly had become distant, fading into the sweetness of the past, and the neighbor
asked if we remembered the drunk who was always wandering the streets. He told us that the man turned up dead one morning in the Vazquez de Mella Plaza, purple with cold, his beard and eyelashes white with frost, rigid and wrapped in rags like those polar explorers who get lost and go mad in deserts of ice.

I WAS SO NERVOUS
as we walked through those gilded salons that my knees were knocking, and I wished I still held the hand of my mother, who was just in front of me, very serious, quiet, like everyone in the group. She was dressed in black for my father and brother, and all the others wore dark suits, very stiff, very formal, some with uniforms and medals, all just as nervous and upset as I although they hid it. The only thing you could hear were footsteps on the marble floor, as if we were walking down the nave of a cathedral, and I beside my mother, as almost always in my life, moved and afraid, with a lump in my throat, looking at her profile because she never turned toward me, so straight, taller and stronger than I was, and proud of being the widow and mother of heroes. My mother would have given me a severe and mocking look if I tried to take her hand as I did when I was little and she took me to a protest march and I held her hand so hard that my fingers hurt because I feared the crowd would get wild and my mother and my father would be separated from me, feared that the
guardias
would charge, or that the people running away—and the horses we heard whinnying and pawing the ground, ready for their riders to spur them to attack—would
crush me. Some soldiers, maybe they were ushers, guided us through the corridors, kept going ahead of us to open the doors, some of which were very tall and gilded, and others as plain as office doors, and every time we went by one my heart squeezed and I thought, now we're going to see him, and when I'm so close that I can shake his hand I hope I don't faint or burst into tears like a silly girl. My mother says I have the reactions of a child, although I wasn't one, far from it, I would be twenty-five in January, and this was December 21, 1949, Stalin's birthday, and we were going to have the chance to offer him congratulations in the name of our Party and all Spanish workers, with more solemnity than usual because it was his seventieth birthday and there would be a huge party for all Communists and workers around the world. The salon where they took us was large and filled with people, although no voices were raised, only a little for the speeches, and not much even then. I believe we were all equally moved, overwhelmed, I don't know whether that's the word, since often I'm going to say something and then after I've begun to speak realize I'm saying it in Russian and can't find the words in Spanish. Chandeliers were switched on, but they didn't give much light, or maybe there was smoke, or the sky was dark outside even though it was daytime, I remember, and everything was a little foggy. I couldn't get close to Stalin and didn't shake his hand, either because my mother motioned to me not to get on line or because someone pushed me back and I ended up in a different group. After all, I was nobody, I'd been allowed to come with our delegation because I begged my mother to take me along; when I had children and grandchildren I wanted to be able to tell them that once in my life I saw Stalin with my own eyes, and really close.

I was so nervous that I didn't notice much of what was going on, or didn't understand it, with that dim light and the low voices. But I could see Stalin well; he was seated at the middle of
a
long table, chatting with someone, very informal, smoking and laughing, and I almost had to pinch myself to believe that I was actually seeing him, the flesh-and-blood man, unmistakable, like a member of my family—he reminded me of the time I was a little girl and saw my father standing among a group of men—but also very different, I don't know how to explain it; he looked as he did in the pictures we'd seen everywhere forever, and yet he wasn't much like them, he was older and smaller, and I saw his short legs beneath the table and his crossed boots, and when he laughed, his face filled with wrinkles and his small teeth were chipped, or black from tobacco, and his uniform was a little big on him, but precisely for those reasons I was more moved than I'd expected, and in a different way, because I thought I would be seeing a giant at the peak of his strength but it turned out that Stalin was a tired old man, the way my father was at the end of his life. Fragile even though he'd had the enormous strength it took to rebel against the czar, oversee the birth of socialism, and win the war against the Nazis; you could see that all those years of effort and sacrifice had worn him down, like the years in the mines and in prison wore my father down, and I thought he looked as if he hadn't slept well, and every so often he'd seem to be somewhere else while someone was talking to him or as he listened to a speech, until I felt sorry for him, for the sickish color of his skin and all those years with no rest, clear back to when he was a boy in the times of the czars and they deported him to Siberia. Later my mother said to me, “You should have seen your face when you were looking at him, your mouth was hanging open, and you'd have thought you were seeing a movie star.” But then something happened as I stared at Stalin, not taking my eyes off him as if no one else were there. I wanted to remember all the details of his face and felt sorry for him, he looked so exhausted, and the uniform jacket on him was so big, then I felt a stab, like an electric shock. Someone was looking at me, coldly, with rage,
for my bad manners in staring so openly at Stalin, a small, bald man seated near him, wearing those old-fashioned glasses they call pince-nez, and a bow tie and high celluloid collar that were just as old-fashioned. I turned to ice and still get shivers down my spine when I think it was Beria, but I wasn't afraid of him because he was the chief of the KGB, it was those eyes, which cut through the space separating us. He was studying me as you would an insect, as if saying, “Who do you think you are to be staring at Stalin like that? How did you get in here?” But there was something beyond that, and I was so stupid in those days that I didn't realize what it was, although instinctively I felt repelled, the way I did by those men who stared at me when I lived in the girls' residence and didn't understand why they breathed so hard and never took their eyes off me and brushed against me in the trolley.

As I'm sitting here, memories come back, and it seems unreal that so many things happened to me, that I was in such faraway places, at the Black Sea and in Siberia and the Arctic Circle, but I'm far from things here too, Madrid is a long way from Moscow. I don't know Madrid as well, I'm afraid to go outside with all those cars and people, afraid of getting lost and not finding my way back, especially since the time I was mugged just outside the front door, thrown to the ground, my purse snatched, and I lay there on the sidewalk screaming, “Thief, thief,” but no one came to help, though now that I think about it, I probably shouted in Russian because of the problem I have with the two languages, speaking in one and thinking in the other. I always dream in Russian, and about things that happened there, or happened many years ago when I was little, before they sent us to the Soviet Union for a few months, they said, and then until the war was over, but the war ended and they didn't send us home, and soon another war broke out and then it was impossible, it seemed the world was coming to an end. They evacuated us and sent us a
long way away, I don't know how many days we traveled by train, days and weeks, always in the snow, and I thought, I'm getting farther and farther away from Spain, from my mother and father, although I almost didn't remember them, I even began to feel a little hostile toward them, I'm ashamed to say, because they shouldn't have let me get on that boat, leaving me alone again, as they did when they went to their union or Party meetings. My brother and I were left alone all night, he crying because he was afraid or hungry and I rocking him in my arms, although I wasn't much older, such a scared little boy he was and weakly because of our bad diet, but how strong and brave he became later, when at twelve he went out with me to sell the
Mundo obrero,
the Worker's World, that was when we still lived in Madrid. He told me, “Don't be afraid of those fancy young guys, because if they come after us I'll protect you,” and later, when he was just twenty and a pilot in the Red Army, he came to see me and lifted me off my feet and whirled me around as he hugged me, so handsome in his air-force uniform and the red star on his cap. Then he came to say good-bye because his squadron had been ordered to the Leningrad front, and he never stopped laughing and singing Spanish songs with me, and he inspired all the girls in the school to be nurses for the troops. That night I went with him to the station, and when the train was pulling out he hopped down and hugged and kissed me again, then jumped back on the train and grabbed the handrail as if he were swinging onto a horse, and he waved goodbye with his cap in his hand, and I never saw him again. That's the strangest thing about life, something I can't get used to, that you have someone you're close to and who's always been there, and a minute later he disappears and it's as if he never existed. But I know my brother died a hero, that he kept attacking the Germans when his plane had one engine on fire, crashing it into the enemy artillery, a hero of the Soviet Union, and his photo was published in
Pravda
looking as handsome as a movie
star. I sit here thinking about him, the memory comes without my doing anything, as if I opened the door and my brother calmly walked in, with that smile and poise of his, I see him before me in his pilot's jacket and imagine we're talking and remembering things. I tell him everything that's happened to me since his death more than fifty years ago, how the world has changed, how everything we fought for has been lost, everything that he and so many like him gave their lives for, but he never loses his good humor, he scratches his head beneath the cap, pats my knee, and says, “Here, now, woman, don't go on so.” Sometimes I'm awake and see him standing before me as clearly as in my dreams, but strangest of all is not that he's come back or that he's still a boy of twenty, but that he speaks to me in Russian, so fast and perfect and without an accent, because Russian was really hard for him, worse than for me at the beginning, when people spoke to me and I didn't understand, and not understanding was worse than being cold or hungry. Now it's the other way around, sometimes I don't understand Spanish, and I can't get used to how people speak, so loud and curt, as if they were always in a hurry or angry, like the man the day I was mugged, who helped me get up and stand because I was in pain, thinking, “What if my hip is broken? What if they have to put my leg in a cast and then I can't go out? Who will come help me?” The man said, “Damn it to hell, señora, I'll go with you to the station to file a complaint, because we need to crack down on those bastards, it had to be one of those goddamned
moros
who hang around here.” I thanked him but kept my dignity and said, “No, señor, it wasn't a
moro
who attacked me, he was white as snow, and besides, you shouldn't call them
moros,
they're not Moors, they're Moroccans, and as for the complaint, that will have to wait, because the important thing to me right now is to get to the protest: this is May Day.” The man looked at me as if I were crazy, “Well that's up to you, señora, whatever you say,” and I thanked him and went on to the protest,
limping, but I went, and when it was over, some comrades took me to the police station in their car and I filed the complaint, but I'm not one to miss a May Day, even though it's not the same anymore, each time fewer people come and it's all so watered down, there's just a few red flags and raised fists, and not even those marching in the front, right behind the banner, know the Internationale.

 

IT ISN'T THE WAY NOW
it was before the war, when we used to go with my mother and father, and my brother and I would look at them, raising our fists just the way they did, there on Calle Alcalá, which turned into a sea of people and red flags, or in the Soviet Union in Red Square on May 1 the year the war ended, where there wasn't room for any more people or shouting or flags or songs or fervor, with millions cheering for Stalin. Squashed in the crowd, I cheered too, excited to think that the tiny figure I could see on the platform atop Lenin's mausoleum in the distance was him, and I cried with joy and gratitude because he had led us in the victory over Germany, which cost so many Soviet lives, my poor brother among them, although now you would think that the Americans won that war, that they were the only ones who fought, and people know about the landing in Normandy but don't know that the German army met its first defeat at Stalingrad, in the bloodiest and most heroic battle of the war. No one even knows there was a city called Stalingrad, they didn't lose any time changing that name, like they did with Leningrad, what a disgrace that now it's called what it was in the time of the czars, Saint Petersburg, and they even want to canonize Nicholas II, who ordered machine guns to fire on the people in front of the Winter Palace. Oh, I see your expression, though you're trying to hide it, don't think I don't know what you're thinking, all those stories about Stalin's concentration camps and Stalin's crimes, as if he had done nothing but kill people, or as if
everyone who was sentenced to the camps were innocent. Of course there were mistakes, the Party itself recognized that at its Twentieth Congress, and denounced the cult of personality, and did everything possible to remedy injustices and rehabilitate those who weren't guilty, but how could there
not
be a personality cult when Stalin had done so much for us, for the Soviet people and for workers around the world? He was responsible for the great leap from backwardness to industrialization, the Five Year Plans that were the envy and admiration of all the world, when in only twenty years the Soviet Union moved from being a rural country to a world power. And all that under the worst circumstances, following a war provoked by the imperialists, in the midst of a siege and an international blockade, in a country with shortages of everything and where the great majority of the population was illiterate, a slave to the czar and the popes. Look what they were, or what
we
were, because I've been a Soviet citizen, and look how the country is now, how in a few years they've destroyed what it cost several generations to build, the largest country in the world broken up into pieces and Russia in the hands of the Mafia and governed by a drunk, so don't tell me things are better now than in Stalin's time, or Brezhnev's, when they say the people suffered such oppression. What they don't say is that there were saboteurs and spies everywhere, that imperialism employed the dirtiest tactics to destroy the Revolution, and that Jews had taken over many of the key posts in the government and were conspiring to benefit the United States and Israel.