Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

The customs formalities on the Spanish side were brief. The officials left their less lucrative work of minutely inspecting the jittery refugees' papers and their reductions of a lifetime's possessions and came to get their bonuses. Felsen, who knew that this was the border post that would see most of his business, had prepared himself for the crossing with French brandy and jambon de Bayonne. His drivers were furious. The deal was sealed with shots of cheap aguardente and the convoy moved across to the Portuguese side at Vilar Formoso.

The Portuguese army escort had not arrived. There was a member of the German legation who'd already dispatched a messenger to Guarda. They arranged for the drivers to park the trucks in the square outside the ornately tiled railway station, which showed framed scenes of all the major towns in Portugal. The square was packed with more wild-eyed people. The drivers went looking for food again. They found a soup kitchen which had been set up by firms from Porto but it was for British passport-holders only. They tried talking to the refugees. The women, collapsed under coloured shawls, wouldn't look at them, and with the men, in long mud-rimmed coats with furry hats jammed down over thick black matted hair and faces blanked out and ragged with beards, they could find no common language. There were Poles and Czechs, Yugoslavs and Hungarians, Turks and Iraqis. They tried the less picturesque-men in creased three-piece business suits who stood above exhausted women and howling children but they were Dutch or Flemish, Rumanians or Bulgarians and in no mood for sign language, especially of the sort which involved pointing a finger into the mouth. Even the young were uncommunicative-the boys shifty, the girls cringing and babies either wailing or mute and vacant. When the engine of one of the approaching Portuguese army motorcycles back-fired, this massed driftwood of war ducked and flinched as one.

Felsen worked on the customs officials using charm and some supplies that the member of the German legation had brought with him. The Portuguese responded with cheese, choriço and wine and were very helpful with the reams of bureaucracy that needed to be filled out to allow the trucks to move freely in the country. When the convoy moved off the chefe of the alfândega, the customs, came out to wave and wish him a speedy return because he could see that this was the auspicious start of what could be years of graft.

They crossed the River Coa and spent a night at an army post in Guarda where they ate an enormous meal whose four courses all tasted the same and drank a lot of wine from five-litre flagons. Felsen had already begun to feel himself coming round. He knew because he was interested in seeing the women in the kitchens. Since moving to Berlin he'd barely gone forty-eight hours without sex and now it had been more than a week. When finally he saw the women he hoped they'd been especially selected to keep the soldiers' ardour at bay They were all tiny with no more than an inch of forehead between their dark eyebrows and the scarves around their heads. Their noses were sharp, their cheeks sunken and their teeth gone or rotten. He went to bed and slept badly on a flea-ridden mattress.

In the morning they began driving through some of the places they'd seen depicted on the blue and white azulejos in the station at Vilar Formoso. The drivers realized what had been missing from the designs, or perhaps bad roads, poverty and filth looked different in their own colours. They rounded the pine-forested, rock-strewn mountains of the Serra da Estrela on the northern boundary of the Beira Baixa which, as Felsen already knew, was going to be his home for the next years of his life. Where schist and granite meet was where the black, shiny crystalline wolfram occurred, and Felsen could see from the grey/brown block stone houses and slate roofs that this was the right country.

They crossed the Mondego and Dão rivers to Viseu and headed south to Coimbra and Leiria. The air changed. The dry cool of the mountains disappeared and a warm humidity took over. The sun was hot even in early March and they stripped off their coats. The drivers rolled up their shirt sleeves and looked as if they might sing. There were no refugees on the road. The representative from the German legation told them that Salazar was making sure that no more came into Lisbon-the city was already full. They spent a last night on the road at Vila Franca de Xira and got up early the next morning to deliver the gold to the Banco de Portugal before normal office hours.

It was first light as they turned away from the Tagus into the Terreiro do Paço and the trucks made their way behind the arcaded eighteenth-century façade into the grid system of the Baixa, purpose-built by the Marqués de Pombal after the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. They drove along Rua do Comércio, behind the massive triumphal arch at the head of the Rua da Augusta, to the conglomeration of buildings including the church of Sâo Julilo that made up the Banco de Portugal. They waited for the gates to open in the Largo de'Sâo Juliâo and one by one the trucks reversed in to unload.

In the bank Felsen was met by the Director of Finance and another, more senior and taller, member of the German legation who greeted his offered hand with a spring-loaded salute and an incongruous ' Heil Hitler' This did not appear to disturb the bank's finance director who, he found out later, was a member of the Portuguese Legion. It had confused Felsen who only managed a half-wave in return, like a bad attempt at getting a waiter's attention, and the words 'Ja, ja.' He also missed the tall, Prussian-looking man's name. It wasn't until the gold had been unloaded and accounted for that Felsen saw the man signing the endless documentation with his left hand in the name of Fritz Poser. He noticed that the right hand was a gloved prosthesis.

By 11.00 a.m. the business was completed. The junior member of the legation had taken the drivers to an army barracks on the outskirts of the city and Poser and Felsen were sitting in the back of a flagged Mercedes driving down Rua do Ouro towards the river. The pavements were packed with people, mostly men in dark suits, white shirts, dark ties and hats a size too small for their heads who swerved past barefooted boys selling newspapers. The few women were smart and dressed in tweed suits with hats and furs even though it wasn't cold. The faces flashed by as the car picked up speed in the empty street, one woman hatless and blonde stared at the car, the small swastika flapping on the bonnet, mesmerized. Then her head flicked away and she buried herself in the crowd. Felsen turned in his seat. A boy was running alongside the car waving the Diário de Notiçias in his face.

'Lisbon is full,' said Poser. 'It's as if the whole world is here.'

'I saw them at the border.'

'The Jews?'

Felsen nodded, tired now after the anxiety of the journey.

'There's a more eclectic mix down here. Lisbon can cater for all tastes. It's one long party for some.'

'So there's no rationing.'

'Not yet and not for us anyway. It will come though. The British are mounting their Economic Blockade and the Portuguese are beginning to suffer. Fuel could start to be a problem, they don't have any of their own tankers and the Americans are being difficult. Of course you can eat well if you like seafood and drink their wine if your palate's not too French. There's still sugar at the moment and the coffee is good.'

They turned right out of the Praça do Comércio and followed the Tagus past the docks. At Santos there was a huge brawling mass of people, men, women and children fighting outside the offices of the shipping lines.

'This is the more distasteful end of Lisbon,' said Poser. 'You see that ship, the Nyassa, in the docks there. They all want to get on the Nyassa but it's full. It's been full for weeks. In fact it's been filled twice over but these morons think that because it's there they can get on it. Most of them don't have any money which means they don't even have American visas. Ah well, the Guarda National Republicana will be along in a moment and break them up. Last week it was the same with the Serpa Pinto , next week it will be the Guiné. Always the same.'