Antonio Molina - Sepharad

Mother and daughter woke at dawn. Through the window, beneath the beating rain, they could see a rustic patio with chicken coops and an area of garden. They took turns washing with the icy cold water in the pitcher beneath the washstand and dressed in the drab, dignified, and inexpensive clothing they always wore, clothes that never kept them warm, just as there was never enough food to satisfy their hunger. When her mother tried to leave the room, the knob wouldn’t turn, the door wouldn’t open.

“I told you last night not to turn the key.”

“But I didn’t, I’m sure.”

The key lay on the dressing table opposite the bed. They inserted it in the lock, turned it this way and that, but nothing happened. The key didn’t click, it seemed not to meet any resistance, merely turned ineffectually in the lock. It wasn’t that it didn’t fit because it was the key to a different room. The mechanism appeared to function, but the door simply didn’t open.

The mother grew nervous. She rattled the doorknob and the key, beat on the lock, bit her lips. She said in a low voice that if they didn’t get out, they would miss the train to Paris and couldn’t go back to Denmark, would have to stay forever in France, where they had no one, where no one had given them so much as a smile of welcome, not even recognition. She took the key from the lock but then couldn’t get it back in, and when she finally did, refusing to let her daughter help her, she turned it so hard that the key broke in half.

“Why don’t we ask for help?” said Camille. “They’d laugh at us, two ridiculous Jews. Who ever would expect to be locked in like this?”

They tried the window: it, too, was impossible to open, although they didn’t see any latch, and of course there was no lock. They had to ask for help. A few minutes later, her mother, now out of control, her jaw hanging loose and her eyes glassy with fear — the fear she’d suffered during the flight that had saved her daughter four years before — beat on the door with desperation, yelling for help.

It was with relief that they heard footsteps on the stairs and along the hallway. The owner of the hotel, with the help of a wire, managed to extract from the lock the half of the key that had broken off, but when he introduced the master key, the door still wouldn’t open. From both sides, the door was pushed, shaken, and pounded, but it remained firmly locked, and the wood was too thick and the hinges too solid for them to batter it down.

Her mother was choking. She had sat down on the bed, in her black traveling clothes — ancient overcoat, small hat, and wide, misshapen shoes — and was breathing open-mouthed, nostrils flaring, wringing her hands or burying her face in them, the way she had when mother and daughter went down into the shelters during the raids at the beginning of the war. We’ll never get out of here, she kept saying, we shouldn’t have come back, this time they won’t let us leave. Camille then made a decision she was still proud of forty years later. She threw the washstand pitcher at the window, and as the glass broke, the cool, damp morning air flowed in. But it was too high for them to jump down to the patio, and the ladder someone went to look for never appeared.

They never did get the door open. An hour later the manager opened a second, sealed door hidden behind an armoire that the two of them struggled to pull away.

Despite all this, they caught a train to Paris that same morning. Her mother led her by the hand, squeezing hard, and told her that they were going back to Denmark and that she would never again set foot in France. In the train compartment, she was as pale, and looked as worn, as if she’d been traveling a long, long time, like many of the refugees and exiles in those times who were seen wandering around stations, waiting days, entire weeks, for trains to arrive that had no schedule or precise destinations, because in many places tracks had been twisted and bridges destroyed by bombings or sabotage. One gentleman with an air of genteel penury very like theirs offered the girl half of the orange he unrolled from a very clean handkerchief and peeled with extreme tidiness while they had tried not to look or notice the tart, tempting aroma that filled the air, erasing the usual odors of sweaty clothes and tobacco smoke. He was the first person to smile at them since they arrived in France. They struck up a conversation, and the mother told him the name of the town and the hotel where they’d spent the night. When he heard it, the man stopped smiling. He was also the only one they’d met who spoke without caution or fear.

“That was a good hotel before the war,” he told them. “But I’ll never go in it again. During the occupation the Germans converted it into a barracks for the Gestapo. Terrible things happened in those rooms. People passing through the town plaza heard screams, though they acted as if nothing were wrong.”

When she stopped talking, Camille Safra shook her head slowly and smiled with her eyes closed. When she opened them, they were moist and shining. Those eyes had been beautiful in her youth, when she traveled with her mother through France on that train and had shyly and enviously looked at the orange the man in her car so carefully peeled on his white handkerchief. She told me that toward the end of her mother’s life, in the hospital room where Camille spent nights beside her bed, her mother waked at times from a nightmare and asked her not to lock the door, breathing through her open mouth, staring at her with eyes wide with fear, fear not only for her approaching death but also, and perhaps worse, for the death she and her daughter had escaped forty-five years before.

At the end of the luncheon at the Writer’s Club, several toasts were made with excessive fervor. I don’t remember whether any was in my honor, but perhaps they were in Danish and I didn’t understand them. The clearest memory I have of that trip to Copenhagen, aside from the misanthropic statue of Kierkegaard and the Andalusian red tiles of Pepe’s Bar, is of the journey the woman named Camille Safra made during the rainy, lugubrious autumn of the war’s end in Europe. While traveling, you hear and tell tales of journeys. “Wherever a man goes, he takes his novel with him,” Galdós writes in Fortunata y Jacinata. But sometimes, looking at travelers who never say a word to anyone but sit silent and impenetrable beside me in their plane seat or who drink their drink in the dining car or stare at the monitor showing a movie, I wonder about the stories they know and aren’t telling, about the novels each carries inside, the journeys lived or heard or imagined that they must be remembering as they travel in silence at my side, shortly before disappearing forever from my sight, their faces forgotten, as mine is to them, like those of Franz Kafka on the Vienna express or Niceto Alcalá Zamora on a bus traveling through the desolate landscape of northern Argentina.

AND YOU, WHAT WOULD you do if you knew that at any moment they could come for you, that your name may already be on a typed list of prisoners or future dead, or suspects, or traitors? Maybe right now someone has penciled in a mark beside your name, taking the first step in a proceeding that will lead to your arrest and possibly your death, or to the immediate necessity of leaving the country, or temporarily, merely, to the loss of your job or of certain minor perks you wouldn’t find too hard to give up. They notified Josef K. of his trial, but no one arrested him; it didn’t even seem that they were watching him. You know how it goes, or at least you should be able to imagine it, you’ve seen what happens to others close to you, neighbors who disappear, or had to flee, or stayed as if there were no danger, no threat to them. At night you’ve heard footsteps on the stairs and in the hall that lead to the door of your apartment, and you feared that this time it was for you, but the footsteps stopped before they reached your door, or went by, and you heard the pounding on another door, and the car you heard drive away later took someone who could have been you, although you prefer not to believe it, telling yourself they have no reason to arrest you or any of yours, at least for now. You never did anything, never stood out in any way. You belonged to the Party since you were very young, and Comrade Stalin’s picture hangs in the dining room of your home. You’re a Jew, but only by blood, your parents brought you up in the Protestant religion, and to love Germany. In the summer of 1914, as soon as war was declared, you enlisted, you received an Iron Cross for bravery in combat, you don’t belong to any Jewish organization, you don’t feel the least sympathy for Zionism: you are, intimately, by education, by language, even physically, German through and through.