Antonio Molina - Sepharad

IN OCTOBER OF 1936, an emissary presented himself in Münzenberg’s Paris offices, a man whom he had never seen and whom he disliked because of his surliness and obvious air of an informer or jailer. When the man entered, he examined the office out of the corner of his eye, disapproving of the luxury of the carpet, the curtains and paintings, the solid, bold shapes of the furniture, the tubular chairs, the art deco table at which Münzenberg was seated, leaning on his elbows, surrounded with documents and telephones. Without preamble or ceremony, the man told Münzenberg that his presence was required in Moscow.

There is also a traitor in the story, a shadow at Münzenberg’s side, the rancorous and docile, cultivated and polyglot subordinate — Münzenberg spoke only German, and that with a strong lower-class accent — Otto Katz, also called André Simon. Slim, elusive, an old friend of Franz Kafka, Katz was the organizer of the congress of antifascist intellectuals of Valencia, Münzenberg’s and the Comintern’s representative among the intellectuals of New York and the actors and screenwriters of Hollywood, a perpetual spy, the fawning adulator of Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, all fervent and cynical Stalinists. The éminence grise behind Münzenberg’s grand machinations, he also reported on his superior’s every action and word to the new hierarchs of Moscow.

Münzenberg quickly pledges his loyalty, of course, but in spite of how perceptive he is about character and weakness he fails to detect the edge of resentment beneath Katz’s suaveness, or the meticulous patience with which Katz secretly collects small IOUs for the insults he suffers or imagines, the humiliation that Münzenberg’s uncontrolled and baroque energy has inflicted through the years. Koestler writes that Katz was dark and distinguished, attractive in a slightly sordid way. He spoke and wrote fluently in French, English, German, Russian, and Czech. He had discussed literature with Milena Jensenska in the cafés of Prague and Vienna. He always squinted one eye when he lit his cigarettes or was absorbed in something. During the Spanish Civil War, he directed the official news agency of the Republican government, which entrusted him with secret funds allocated to influence certain French publications and politicians. Münzenberg rescued him from poverty and despair in Berlin, where at the beginning of the 1920s Katz was frequenting the haunts of beggars and drunks and loitering near bridges favored by suicides. In 1938, when Münzenberg was expelled from the German Communist Party, accused of secretly working for the Gestapo, Katz was one of the first to repudiate him publicly and call him a traitor.

That rat Otto Katz gave him the Judas kiss, plotted his death, even if he didn’t personally tighten the noose around his neck.

Many years later, an ancient woman of ninety speaks into a microphone in the dusk of an apartment in Munich. Age has erased the haughtiness from her face but not her imperious bearing or the glitter in her eyes, just as time has not calmed her scorn for that long-ago traitor, who also was eventually expelled and condemned, executed in 1952 in a cell in Prague with a rope around his neck. There was no mercy for executioners either, it seems. “Otto Katz!” says the old woman, pronouncing that name as if spitting it through her tightly pressed lips painted with a ragged streak of crimson.

I also track this woman through literature, seek her face in photographs, browse the labyrinths of the Internet, hoping to find the book she wrote in the 1940s to vindicate her husband’s memory and denounce and shame those who plotted his death. I see scenes, images not invoked by will or based on any recollection but endowed with a somnambulist precision in which imagination does not intervene: curtains drawn in the Munich apartment, in October 1989, the tape whirring with a slight hiss in the small recorder before her, an archive where her voice will be preserved, a voice I never heard, it came to me through the soundless words of a book discovered by chance and read voraciously during a sleepless night.

For two or three years I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theater. That these stills were never in narrative sequence made them all the more powerful, freed them of the weight and vulgar conventions of a scenario; they were revelations in the present, with no before or after. When I didn’t have the money to go inside, I would spend hours looking at the photographs outside the theater, not needing to invent a story to fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole.

The creaking of the parquet floor in our new house, or a bad dream about illness or misfortune, woke me suddenly, and I was Willi Münzenberg waking in the middle of the night in his house in Paris or in the icy room of a Moscow hotel, fearing that his executioners were approaching, wondering how long it would be before a shot or knife brought an end to the great illusion and delirium of his public existence, and the long tenderness of his married life with Babette, who lay sleeping at his side, hugging him in her sleep the way you hug me, with the determination of a sleepwalker.

The local train stops at the small station of La Sierra de Madrid: drizzle, hillsides covered with trees and fog, the strong scent of wet vegetation — rockrose, pines, cedars — and steep slate rooftops give the impression that you have traveled much farther, to a hidden mountain retreat where there might be sanatoriums or homes for patients in need of rest and cold, clean air. The train is rapid and modern, but the station building is bare stone and the windows are set in red brick, and the sign with the name of the town is written on yellow tiles. There’s no one on the platform, and no one else has stepped off the train. A scent of forests, of drenched trees and earth, floods my lungs, and the touch of the still, misty air on my face gives me an immediate sense of calm. The train pulls away, and I begin walking along a dirt road, suitcase in hand, toward some farms where lights are just going on. In 1937, fearing for his life, so agitated and exhausted that at times he felt a sharp pain in his chest, the warning of a heart attack, Münzenberg hid for a few months in a clinic in a place called La Vallée des Loups, the valley of the wolves. The name of the director also seemed an indication or promise of something: Dr. Le Sapoureux. But Münzenberg is as ill suited for physical repose as he is for intellectual calm, and the minute he arrives at the clinic he starts spending his nights writing a book. As I step onto the platform of the small train station of La Sierra, alone, I am Willi Münzenberg looking in the dark for the road to the sanatorium.

We have come on a winter afternoon to a hotel in the north, in Vitoria. They have given us a room on the top floor, and when I open the window I see a snow-covered park with little squares and statues and a bandstand and, in the background, above the white rooftops, a gray sky stretching like a receding plain. Münzenberg and Babette succeeded in getting out of Russia, and after a long night on the train they found lodging in a hotel near the station of a Baltic city, still worn out from lack of sleep and the tension of approaching the border, fearful that at the last moment the Soviet guards who inspected their passports would order them off the train.

I walk through Madrid or Paris, and a passing metro train makes the pavement tremble beneath my feet: Münzenberg feels that the world is trembling beneath his feet, that no one but he sees the disaster coming, no one on the terraces of the cafés or walking under the bright lights of the boulevards, as the ground begins to shake beneath marching boots and the weight of armored cars, beneath the bombs falling in Madrid and Barcelona and Guernica that no one in Europe wants to hear, and all the while Hitler is preparing his armies and consulting his maps and Stalin is concocting the great public theater of the Moscow trials and the secret hells of interrogation and execution.