Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'Could I join you?' asked the man in French.

'I'm waiting for someone,' she said, also in French, letting her blonde head slip around to the window again.

'There's nowhere else to sit and I only want a coffee. You're a single person sitting at a table for four.'

'There's someone coming.'

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I didn't mean to…'

'No, no, please,' she said suddenly, her nerves setting her hands off like the pigeons in the square.

He sat opposite her and offered her a cigarette. She refused but had to hold on to her hand to do it. He lit one for himself and seemed to enjoy more than the smell of his own smouldering tobacco. The waiter came to his side.

'Your coffee looks cold, may I…?'

'I'm fine, thank you.'

He ordered one for himself. She looked out into the square again. He'd spoken in Portuguese but not Lisbon Portuguese, more open, like slow Spanish.

'He won't come any quicker, you know,' said the man.

She smiled a sort of relief that she'd begun to feel that he wasn't going to ask to see her papers.

'I can't bear waiting,' she said.

'Have a cigarette, some warmer coffee… it'll pass the time.'

She took a cigarette. He looked at her empty ring finger and the tense shake in her hand. She puffed on it and left a red mark on the white end. She blew out the strange, strong smoke.

'From Turkey,' he said.

'You can get anything here if you can pay,' she said.

'I wouldn't know. I brought these with me. My first day in Lisbon.'

'Where have you come from?'

'From Germany.'

That's why he'd made her tremble.

'Where are you going?'

'I'm staying here for a while and then… who knows? And you?'

'From Holland. I want to go to America.'

Her blue eyes flickered out over the balcony again and then searched the room behind where the man was sitting. His coffee arrived. He ordered one for her. The waiter took her old stained cup away. Her eyes settled back on to him.

'He'll come,' he said, with a reassuring wink.

The four refugees on the table behind had started running down the Portuguese. How uncivilized they were. How uncouth. How all the food tasted the same and have you tried to eat that bacalhau ? Lisbon, oh Lisbon was so boring.

She'd heard it all before and she leaned away from them. She knew it could be dangerous to speak to the man, but after three months in the Lisbon refugee world she thought she'd developed some instinct.

'I can't bear not knowing,' she said.

'Like the waiting.'

'Yes. If I know… if I knew…' she drifted off. 'You don't know what it's like yet, you've only just arrived.'

'Where are you staying?'

'In the Pensão Amsterdão on Rua de São Paulo. And you?'

'I'll find somewhere.'

'Everywhere's full.'

'So it seems. Perhaps I'll go out to Estoril.'

'It's more expensive out there,' she said, shaking her head.

He didn't seem bothered by that. She let her head fall over her shoulder again to look out of the window. This time she leapt to her feet and started waving. She dropped back into her seat and closed her eyes. Her table companion twisted around to view the top of the stairs. A man in his early twenties with blonde, reddish hair came striding through the tables. He faltered when he saw the older man but pulled a chair out and pushed it close to the girl. Her eyes snapped open. Her face fell. He took her hands. She stared into the tablecloth as if her own blood was growing a stain in the middle of it. He leaned into her ear and whispered in English.

'I did everything I could. It's just not possible without… The woman in the visa office…' he stopped as the waiter put a coffee down in front of her, he looked across at the man at their table who was looking out of the window. 'It takes money. A lot of money.'

'I haven't got any money, Edward. Do you know how much the tickets are now? You used to be able to get one for $70, now it's $100. I was there today at the ticket office. A man paid $400 to get on the Nyassa. The longer I stay here…'

'I got as far as the guichet… but then she comes to the window. She doesn't recognize me. She doesn't know me. She won't even take the application unless… unless you can come up with the money, or the right invitations, or…'

The German called for the waiter and paid for the two coffees. He stood and looked down at the young couple. The Englishman was suspicious. The woman had a different look than before-a hungry intensity in her face. The German put on his hat and tipped it at her.

'Thank you for the coffee,' she said. 'You didn't tell me your name.'

'You didn't say yours. I don't think we got that far.'

'Laura van Lennep,' she said. 'And this is Edward Burton.'

'Felsen,' he said. 'Klaus Felsen.'

He put out his hand. The Englishman didn't shake it.

The ambassador didn't make the reception or the dinner that night. Felsen sat between two wolfram exporters, a Portuguese with three concessions in the Trancoso area in the Beira Alta, and a Belgian aristocrat who wouldn't tell him anything other than that it was his group who was providing a shell company through which Felsen was going to export his wolfram.

The members of the legation, who were without their ambassador to remind them of their own insignificance, spent too much of their time extending their own importance into areas which were none of their business. Felsen was left with the impression that all the real work would be done in the corridors of power and hotel lounges of Lisbon rather than in the bleak mountain ranges of the north. He didn't improve his popularity by asking how their oblique bargaining was going to translate into tons in trucks crossing the border. They patronized him back. They hinted at intricate negotiations but offered no substance. They said that he would feel the results. Felsen reinterpreted all this to himself. The Abwehr and Supply Department resented the intrusion of the SS into their territory. He was on his own.

After dinner, as they gathered on the steps waiting for the cars to take them out to Estoril, Felsen still couldn't help being unnerved by the unembarrassed flagrance of light everywhere. All the windows of the palácio, each one or two metres high, glowed from reckless chandeliers of glittering incandescence. As he'd left the Baixa by taxi in the evening the Nyassa was still at anchor, unconcerned in the heart of the docks, blazing with light as the loading continued. Berlin had been widowed for two years. You could end up in a concentration camp for lighting a cigarette in the street after dark. Cars moved around at night with slit eyes, blind as moles. The rest of Europe was like a coal hole and Lisbon its furnace mouth.

A crack and crump of small-arms fire started up around the city. One of the younger legation members with a glass too much of wine inside him shouted: 'The invasion!' and roared.

The Portuguese was stone-faced as they got in the cars. Felsen sat with Poser again in the back of the leading Mercedes. They dropped down the steep hill to Alcântara and headed west out of town.

'What was "the invasion"?' asked Felsen.

'A nightly reminder of who's in charge,' said Poser, looking out of the window as if he was expecting crowds. 'Salazar only allows the Lisboans to beat their carpets after nine at night.'

They drove through Belém, past lit buildings and monuments.

'Not used to the light yet, Herr Hauptsturmführer?' said Poser. 'Still jittery after Berlin, the flak towers and the air raid warnings? This is last year's Expo site. While London burned and France fell, Lisbon showed off its eight hundred years of sovereignty to the world.'