Sepharad (39 page)

You don't know what you could have been, what you might yet be, but you do know what in one way or another you have always been, visibly or secretly, in reality and in daydreams, although perhaps not in the eyes of others. And what if you truly
were what others perceive and not what you imagine yourself to be, just as you aren't the person you see in the mirror? Hans Mayer, Austrian nationalist, blond, blue-eyed, son of a Catholic mother, himself an agnostic, a lover of literature and philosophy, and who dressed on festival days in the lederhosen, suspenders, and kneesocks of folkloric garb, realized that he was a Jew not because his father was Jewish, not because of any physical trait or custom or religious belief, but because others so decreed, and the indelible proof of it was the prison number tattooed on his forearm. In his room in Prague, in his parents' home, in the office of his company that insured labor-related accidents, in the rooms of the sanatoriums, in the hotel room in the border city of Gmünd where he awaited Milena's arrival, Kafka invented the perfect guilty party before Hitler and Stalin: Josef K., the man who is sentenced not because he's done anything or stands out for any reason, but because he has been found guilty, and he can't defend himself because he doesn't know what he is accused of, and when his execution comes, instead of rebelling he tamely submits and even feels ashamed.

 

YOU CAN WAKE UP
one morning at the unpleasant hour of the working man and discover with less surprise than mortification that you've been transformed into an enormous insect. You can go to your usual café believing that nothing has changed, and learn from the newspaper that you are not the person you thought you were and no longer safe from shame and persecution. You can go to your doctor's office believing you will live forever, and leave a half hour later knowing that a gulf separates you from others, even though no one sees it yet in your face, that you carry inside you the shadow that waits invisible for all. You are the physician waiting in the dusk of your office for the patient to whom you must tell the truth, and you dread the moment of his arrival and the necessary, neutral words. But most of all you are the patient
still unaware, who walks calmly down a familiar street, taking his time because he's early for the appointment, leafing through the newspaper that he just bought and that will be left forgotten on a table in the waiting room, a newspaper with a date like any other in the calendar but a date that marks the borderline, the end of one life and the beginning of another, two lives, two yous that could not be more different.

You climb the stairway with the newspaper under your arm. You almost forgot the appointment, even thought of canceling it, the examination and the simple blood test, it all seemed so silly. You push the door of the doctor's office and give your name to the nurse. You make yourself comfortable on a sofa in the waiting room and look at your watch, not knowing that it is marking the last minutes of vigor and health. You look at your watch, cross your legs, open a newspaper in the doctor's office or in a café in Vienna in November 1935, when a news article will drive you out of your routine and out of your country and make you a stranger forever. A guest in a hotel, you woke up one night with a fit of coughing and spat blood. The newspaper tells of the laws of racial purity newly promulgated in Nuremberg, and you read that you are a Jew and destined to extermination. The smiling nurse appears in the doorway of the waiting room and tells you that the doctor is ready to see you. Gregor Samsa awoke one morning and found himself transformed. Sometimes in the streets of the city I thought was mine, I passed impoverished Jews, émigrés from the East, in their long, greasy overcoats and black hats, with sweaty curls at their temples, and felt repelled, glad that in no way did I resemble those obstinately archaic figures who moved through the spacious streets of Vienna as they had the villages they had left in Poland, Yugoslavia, or Ukraine. No one would stop me from walking into a park or a café, or print crude caricatures of me in the yellow press. But now I am as marked as they. The healthy, blond man reading his newspaper in a café in Vienna one Sunday
morning, dressed in lederhosen and kneesocks and Tyrolean suspenders, in the eyes of the waiter who has served him so often will soon be as repulsive as the poor Orthodox Jew whom men in brown shirts and red armbands humiliate for sport, and he will travel with him in a cattle car and end up exactly the same way, a walking cadaver slipping in the mud of the death camps, wearing the same striped uniform and cap, sharing the same darkness and panic in the gas chamber. The doctor runs his fingers over a white seashell, strokes the mouse of the computer, seeking in your file the symptoms that confirm the diagnosis, the sentence, the word neither of you utters. When you go back outside, your eyes are at first dazzled by the sun. The passing men and women are strangers. You walk through the city that no longer is yours, and it is with less surprise than shame that you discover, what a bitter awakening, that you are a giant insect. You move through a sinister nightmare, though the places are everyday places and the light is that of a sunny morning in Madrid. You walk along a familiar sidewalk in Berlin, over glass from shopwindows shattered during the night, and smell the gasoline that fired the stores of your Jewish neighbors. Later you will remember the headlines, the photograph of Hitler, the chancellor, on a stage in Nuremberg, gesticulating before a panoply of flags and eagles, the large letters that announced your fate, that identified you as the carrier of a plague. You are Jean Améry viewing a landscape of meadows and trees through the window of the car in which you are being taken to the barracks of the Gestapo. You are Eugenia Ginzburg listening for the last time to the sound her door makes as it closes, the house she will never return to. You are Margarete Buber-Neumann, who sees the illuminated sphere of a clock in the early dawn of Moscow, a few minutes before the van in which she is being driven enters the darkness of the prison. You are Franz Kafka discovering with amazement that the warm liquid you are vomiting is blood.

BACK HOME, I LOOKED
in the encyclopedia for that name I'd never heard but kept repeating to myself during the taxi ride, a name I didn't catch at first because my friend doesn't speak very loud and it was noisy in the restaurant where we had lunch. It's November, the evenings are much shorter now, and the winter dusk is still unexpected in the narrowest, darkest streets. We said good-bye at the door of the building he lives in, a block of modern apartments that don't seem to fit his character or age or the life he's led. Who could guess the life of this man, seeing him as he crosses the street or stands in the entryway of that anonymous building? A vigorous old man with a sparkle in his small eyes, a little bent, and with very fine white hair, like Spencer Tracy toward the end, or like my paternal grandfather, who was also in a war, but not one he marched off to voluntarily, and it may be that my grandfather never completely understood why they took him or realized the magnitude of the cataclysm his life had been dragged into, a life of which mine, if I stop to think about it, is in part a distant echo.

My friend is eighty, almost the age of my grandfather when he died, but he doesn't think about death, he tells me, just as he
didn't think about it when he found himself on the Russian front in the winter of 1943, a very young second lieutenant soon to be promoted to lieutenant because of valor and having been awarded an Iron Cross. You don't think about death when you're twenty and in peril every minute, when with pistol in hand you advance across a no-man's-land and suddenly your face and uniform are sprayed with the blood of the man beside you, who in one burst of machine-gun fire becomes a mound of entrails sprawled in the mud. You think only about how cold it is, or about the rations that never showed up, or about sleep, because the worst things in war are the cold and lack of sleep, my friend says, taking a brief, reflective sip of wine. He is seated directly across from me, older than any of the diners in the restaurant, all men, all the same age and wearing midlevel-executive suits, some speaking in an elementary but fluent English in that overly loud tone you tend to use when you're on a cell phone in a public place. Their conversations mix with ours, the bleeps and music of their phones, the clinking of dishes and glassware, so I have to strain to hear what my friend is saying. I lean toward him across the table, especially when there's a foreign name, of some German general or Russian sector or city I never knew existed, one of so many cities of the world that you will never hear of, just as millions of people don't know the name of the small town where I was born, though it's completely real to me, clear in every detail, in its census of living and dead, the living whom I hardly ever see now and the dead who are fainter in memory with each passing day, although sometimes they reappear suddenly, like my paternal grandfather who died fourteen years ago.

I remember Pascal's maxim: Entire worlds know nothing of us. Nevertheless, that foreign city is taking on a presence in my mind, which my friend established when he spoke its name in a restaurant in Madrid. The first time he said it, I paid no attention, because the story he was telling was more important to me,
then he said it again but I didn't catch it, with the noise. I interrupted him to ask the name of this city in Estonia. But who can imagine what Estonia is like, what lies behind that name, inside that name? It's like trying to put yourself inside those small glass globes with snowy scenes that people used to have in their homes and you shook to make the snow swirl. Snow also falls in winter in Estonia, in that small city in the provinces, beside a river with the same name, Narva—the Narva River carries huge masses of ice in the winter, my friend tells me, remembering, and that recalled detail means it was early winter when he reached the city.

Afterward, I came home in a taxi, from the sunny autumnal openness of the west part of Madrid to the somber streets of the center, where night is closer, night and the damp cold of winter twilights: mist and the woodsy smell of the road that runs beside a river that is beginning to freeze over and that empties into the Baltic thirteen kilometers beyond the city that bears its name. I was in a taxi in Madrid but also traveling through the places my friend had told me about, and a lifetime of vanished years were squeezed together in the ten or fifteen minutes of my ride, just as the Madrid I barely glanced at out the window was also the dark ruined capital to which my friend returned after his adventures in the European war, less innocent but not completely disillusioned, guarding with modest pride the Iron Cross he still keeps as a talisman.

As I listened, abstracted, to the voices on the taxi radio and the driver's diatribe against the government or the traffic, I thought of that name, mouthed it, decided to look it up in the
Britannica
as soon as I got home: Narva, where my friend was in 1943 and where he returned thirty years later with the nearly impossible task of finding a woman he had seen only once, one night at a dance for German officers he'd been invited to because he was one of the few Spaniards in the Blue Division who spoke German, and also because he liked Brahms and at a certain moment had hummed a melodic passage of the Third Symphony. The war was filled with coincidences like that, with chains of random events that dragged you away or saved you; your life could depend not on your heroism or caution or cleverness but on whether you bent down to tighten a boot one second before a bullet or shard of shrapnel passed through the place where your head would have been, or whether a comrade took your turn in a scouting patrol from which no one came back. My friend was saved that way many times, on the edge of disasters that claimed others, by a coincidence, a fraction of a second. By going to that city in Estonia on a two-day leave he may have avoided certain death. The Brahms melody he loved, Brahms being one of the names on which his worship of Germany was based, changed the course of his life, opening his eyes to a horror for which nothing had prepared him, a horror that marked him for more than the unthinking vertigo of courage and danger.

“There was an inspection of our sector, and the commander of my battalion asked me to act as guide for the German officers. I was with them for several days, and although the Germans didn't have much confidence in us, one of them, a captain almost as young as I was, took a liking to me, because of Brahms. We were standing around, not talking, the three German officers and I, beside a parapet between two machine-gun nests, on one of those calm days when it seemed that nothing would happen at the front, and without thinking I hummed a few bars of a melody. The captain began humming the same thing, but with all the notes, and more slowly, the better to enjoy the memory of the music.” My friend hums too, right there in the restaurant, lips closed, eyes shut, and I hear the music more easily than his words, despite the voices, silverware, and cell phones. I recognize it immediately, because it's a favorite of mine, a powerful and sentimental melody a little like a film score: the third movement of Brahms's Third Symphony. “The other two officers had dropped
behind,
pointing out to each other disapprovingly some defect in our Spanish defenses, but the captain at my side closed his eyes and bobbed his head, and with his right hand he seemed to be drawing the music in the air, his black-gloved index finger a baton directing the sad, undulating theme that combined both great pain and great consolation. He told me that in civilian life he was a professor of philosophy in a gymnasium, and that he played the clarinet in his city orchestra and in a chamber group. That prompted me to mention the Brahms quintet for clarinet, and the German was moved to an almost embarrassing display of affectation,” though those aren't exactly the words my friend used. “I noticed then,” he says, “that he was a bit limp in the wrist, as they say nowadays, in spite of the uniform and how tall and strong he was. He told me that when he played that piece, there were parts where he had to struggle to hold back the tears. It was always as if he were playing that music for the first time, and each time it was more profound, more moving, containing all the grief of Brahms's life. There was only one other quintet for clarinet that he liked as much as the Brahms: I guessed immediately and said, Mozart's, and in the emotion of remembering the music and because of the empathy between us, he told me, lowering his voice, that he also liked Benny Goodman, although in Germany it was impossible to find his records. By then the other officers joined us, and the captain's demeanor changed, he became as rigid as he was at first, as military as they, and didn't say another word about music, barely speaking to me until we said good-bye. Those Germans were very strange,” my friend tells me. “You never knew what was going through their head when they looked at you with those light-colored eyes. Some weeks later, the commander of my battalion called me to say that I had been given a few days' leave because the German officers I accompanied as guide and interpreter were pleased with me and asked that I be allowed to attend a dance in that city behind the lines: Narva.
The captain who was a fan of Brahms and Benny Goodman picked me up at the station. I remember that we drove into the city along a road near a river and bordering a forest, and that though there was still a little sun, it was already starting to get very cold.