Antonio Molina - Sepharad

YOUR ARMS ARE AROUND ME, hugging me tight, as you do when you’re asleep and have a bad dream, you snuggle your icy feet between mine, shivering from the same cold you felt as a little girl, an ancient cold of long winters and houses without heat, cold retained in the rooms of this house as faithfully as the photos of the dead, as the most vivid memories older than reason but already brushed by melancholy and the inkling of inevitable loss: a child’s sudden fear of growing up, the cruel knowledge, which comes from nowhere, that your parents will grow old and die. Also the fear that clutched you in its pincers those nights after your mother’s death, when you didn’t dare go from your bedroom to the bathroom lest you see her in the shadowy hallway in her nightgown, her hair all wild, the way she looked when you came home and were there only a few days before she had to go back to the hospital. You closed your eyes and feared that when you opened them she would be standing at the foot of your bed, asking you something wordlessly, and if you felt you were falling asleep you feared that she would appear in a dream, and you would jerk awake with anguish, thinking you heard the sound of doors opening, or footsteps, and again you felt the raw pain of her death and of being so alone, and shamefully afraid she would come back as a ghost.

FROM BELOW COME THE sounds of conversations and footsteps, a car starting, a telephone ringing, male voices issuing instructions, large objects being shoved around or set down. They’re moving furniture to make room for the coffin. But you don’t want to give in to that thought, you resist imagining the face of your dead aunt, ravaged not only by cancer but also by the old age your mother never knew, a delicate woman young forever because the images you have of the time she was ill are nearly erased and because you happen to have no photographs from her last years. That’s how I see her too, assiduous spy that I am, researcher of your memory, which I want to be as much mine as your present life is. I can’t imagine the woman your mother would be now had she not died: seventy-some years, heavyset, probably with dyed hair. I see her as you do, as you sometimes dream of her, a young woman who still has the smile of a girl, the shadow of which I sometimes intuit on your lips, just as I can see her gaze in your eyes, and that from her — like a ring spreading on the surface of time — comes your inclination to melancholy, your way of building illusions about anything new, the care with which you arrange the objects around you, your devotion to this house in which you and she both were girls, to this oasis with the desertlike hills in the background, this place where she wanted to rest forever and be with her own, with those who gradually have been joining her in the small cemetery with the earthen walls: first her niece, who died even younger than your mother, forever safe from time in the photograph on the television, and tonight her sister, another name added to the tablet in the family pantheon, which you will see tomorrow morning during the burial, and think — maybe for the first time, and without my knowing, without your wanting to say it to me—“When I die, I want you to bury me with them.”

THEY DISAPPEAR ONE DAY, they are lost, erased forever, as if they had died, as if they had died so many years ago that they are no longer in anyone’s memory and there is no sign they were ever in this world. Someone comes along, suddenly enters your life, is part of it for a few hours, a day, the duration of a journey, becomes a presence so insistent that it’s difficult to recall a time he wasn’t there. Whatever exists, even for an hour or two, seems permanent. In Tangiers, in the dark office of a cloth merchant, in a Madrid restaurant, in the dining car of a train, one man tells another fragments from the novel of his life, and the hours of the telling and of the conversation seem to contain more time than will fit within ordinary hours: someone speaks, someone listens, and for each the other’s voice and face take on the familiarity of a person he has always known. Yet an hour or day later, he isn’t there, will never be there, not because he died, although he might have, and his presence for those to whom he was so close dissolves into nothing. For fourteen years, beginning July 30, 1908, Franz Kafka punctually went to his office in the Society for Prevention of Workplace Accidents in Prague, and then one day in the summer of 1922 he left at the customary hour and never returned, because of illness. His disappearance was as inconspicuous as the way he had sat for so many years at his neat desk, where in one of his locked drawers he kept the letters Milena Jesenska wrote him. For some time afterward an old overcoat that he kept there for rainy days hung in the closet, then it too disappeared, and with it the peculiar odor that had identified his presence in the office for fourteen years.

The most stable things vanish, the worst and the best, the most trivial along with those that were necessary and decisive: the years one spends in a dismal office or endures remorsefully indifferent and distant in a marriage, or the memory of a journey to a city where one had either lived or promised oneself to return to after a unique and memorable visit. Love, suffering, even some of the greatest hells on Earth are erased after one or two generations, and a day comes when there is not one living witness who can remember.

In Tangiers, Señor Salama told of going to Poland to visit the camp where the gas chambers swallowed up his mother and two sisters, and of having found nothing but a large clearing in a forest and a sign bearing the name of an abandoned railway station, and of how the horror of the fact that there were now no visible traces of the camp was somehow contained in that name, in the rusty iron sign swinging above a platform beyond which there was nothing but the sweep of the clearing and gigantic pines against a low gray sky from which a silent rain was falling, rain scarcely visible in the fog but dripping from the roof of a shed at the station. It was a camp so unimportant that almost no one knew its name, said Señor Salama, and he pronounced a difficult word that must have been Polish — but then the name Auschwitz hadn’t meant anything to Primo Levi either the first time he saw it written on the sign of a railway station. In a place like that, far from the principal camps, it was easier for deportees to be lost, for their names to disappear from those detailed records the Germans always kept. With that same fanatic administrative zeal they organized the transporting of hundreds of thousands of captives by rail in the midst of the Allied bombings and military disasters of the last months of the war.

Railroad tracks were just visible in the wet grass, rusted rails and rotted ties, and one of Señor Salama’s crutches snagged or got tangled in them, and he nearly fell, fat and clumsy and humiliated, onto the same soil where his mother and two sisters perished, over which they’d walked when they reached the camp and got down from the train that had carried them like animals to the slaughterhouse: three familiar faces and names in an abstract mass of unknown victims. The guide steadied him, the survivor who had driven him here in an old car, and pointed out the now barely visible outlines of walls, the rectangles of cement on which the barracks had stood, a low line of bricks that someone who didn’t know the place well wouldn’t have noticed, it was all that remained of the courtyard where the crematory ovens had been, because the Germans had blown up the buildings at the last moment, after the sky had been red every night for weeks on the eastern horizon and the earth trembled with reverberations from the ever closer Russian artillery. Tens of thousands of human beings killed there over four or five years, unloaded onto this platform from cattle cars and lined up on the cement platforms, with orders barked in German or Polish and cries of pain and desperation, echoes of screams and commands lost in the enormous thicket of conifers, military marches and waltzes played by a spectral orchestra of prisoners… and of all that, nothing was left but a clearing in a forest drenched by a wet mist, and the fog wiping out the view, the places the prisoners would have seen every day through the barbed wire, knowing they would never walk in the outside world again, excluded from the number of the living as if they were already dead.