Antonio Molina - Sepharad

He was so absorbed in the task of pushing through the thorny brush that he was slow to hear the ferocious barking of dogs. A few meters in front of him, invisible till that moment, was a high whitewashed wall topped with jagged glass. He followed it, without coming to a door or window, until he turned a corner and immediately froze. In terror and vertigo he pressed his body to the wall: only one step away was the edge of the cliff and, far below, the splendor and roar of the foam crashing upon the rock that was the base for the bunker.

He stood motionless against the wall struck now by the sun, his eyes closed, not daring to open them and look into emptiness. Then he stepped back, moved away from the precipice, and again heard the dogs. Clinging to the rough wall, he advanced in the narrow space between it and the brush.

He reached an open area in front of the main gate of the house just as a heavyset blond woman came running toward him, sobbing and saying something in a language he didn’t understand. Even before he saw the writing on the ceramic plaque, he remembered that he’d been in this place before. Berghof.

He thought at first that the woman was scolding him for having invaded her property. But she didn’t have the look of the owner of the house, more that of a servant, the hands she was waving so frantically as she shouted to him were the large, reddened hands of a domestic, a scrubbing maid or cook from a different epoch. She screamed and pulled him toward the half-opened iron gate, where the barking was louder. With dreamlike naturalness, he accepted that the woman knew he was a doctor and was asking him to help someone who was ill.

But she can’t have known I was a doctor, she can’t have been waiting for me to come. From the moment he enters the house, dragged in the woman’s tight grip, he imagines he is telling his wife this adventure, telling her later this morning when he is back at the hotel, sitting beside her on the bed, bringing her a story as he would breakfast: I wish you could have seen what happened to me, what I saw.

Led by the woman, he crosses a patio of white walls and marble paving and arches where sheer curtains flutter, offering a view of the sea and the coast of Africa, those same arches we’ve so often seen from the beach, wondering who had the privilege of living there. There is a marble fountain in the middle, but the sound of the water and our footsteps is masked by the barking that becomes even fiercer as I step inside the house. The woman is sobbing and rubbing her hands on her voluminous bosom, looking much older now: the blue eyes, light hair, pug nose, and round, rosy face made her look young, but now I realize she must be over sixty. With tear-filled eyes she gestures for me to hurry. The place is a pastiche of Andalusian and German decor, with huge iron grilles at all the windows and dark, paneled doors. But I see all this very quickly, blurred by confusion. We enter a large room where the woman points to the floor, waving her arms, crying openmouthed, tears streaming down her round, withered cheeks, but my eyes, accustomed to sunlight, are slow to adapt to the shadow, and see nothing.

The moan is the first thing I hear, although not clearly because of the woman’s screams and the barking dogs, who must be penned up nearby, since I also hear them clawing. A moan and the whistling breath of a sick person’s lungs, then I see the figure on the floor, an old man in a silk bathrobe, his yellowish pallor in sharp contrast with the bright red of his gaping mouth and the tongue waggling in search of air, thrust out like a grotesque marine creature struggling to escape a crevice in which it has become wedged. He is clutching his neck with both hands, and when I bend down to him, he grabs the front of my T-shirt, his eyes as wide as his mouth, the color so light that it’s difficult to say whether they’re gray or blue. He pulls me to him with fanatical strength, as if grabbing on to me to keep from drowning, as if he needs to tell me something. His face is so close to mine that I can see his long yellow teeth, the red tear ducts and tiny veins in his eyeballs, and his breath is like a sewer. Bitte, he says, but it’s a death rattle more than a word, and the woman who is sobbing beside me repeats the word, shakes me with her big red hands, urging me to do something, but the man has pulled me closer to him, and I can’t free myself to listen to his chest or attempt in some way to revive him. Beside him on the dark, polished wood floor is a puddle I had thought was urine, but it’s tea. I also see a broken cup and a spoon.

“This man is choking,” I tell the woman, absurdly spacing the words, as if she would then understand me better, and I point to a telephone: You must call an ambulance. What I want most, however, is to leave, get away from there, go back to my hotel room before my wife wakes up. I manage to get to my feet, and when the old man lets go, his breathing is somewhat improved, although his eyes are turned back in his head.

On the telephone table is a small red tray with a swastika in the center, inside a white circle. I haven’t looked around the room since I came in, only now, while I’m waiting for the emergency call to go through. On one wall is a large oil painting of Adolf Hitler, bracketed by two red curtains that turn out to be two flags with swastikas. In the illuminated interior of a glass case is a black leather jacket with the insignia of the SS on the lapels and with a large, dark-stained split on one side. In an ostentatiously framed photograph, Hitler is bestowing a decoration upon a young SS officer. In another glass case is an Iron Cross, and beside it a parchment manuscript written in Gothic characters and with a swastika pressed into the sealing wax.

I see all this in one second, but the number of objects around me is overpowering, they make the room seem crowded although the space is enormous: busts, photos, firearms, burnished, sharp-pointed shells, flags, insignia, paperweights, calendars, lamps, there’s nothing here that isn’t connected with the Nazis, that doesn’t commemorate and celebrate the Third Reich. What I first perceived as confusion is actually in a perfect order that suggests museum cataloging. Meanwhile, the man lies gasping on the floor, calling out to me in a voice so hoarse it seems scarcely to escape the cavern of his chest. Bitte, he says when I hang up the telephone and again bend down to him; he stares at me, terrified. “Be calm,” I tell him, although I’m not sure whether he’s learned any Spanish in all the years he’s lived as a refugee on this coast. An ambulance is on the way. Saliva drools from one side of his mouth. He feels my chest, my face, as if he were blind; he asks me something, orders me to do something, in German. Now he is breathing a little more regularly, but his eyes are still turned back and half closed. When I check his wrist for a pulse — skin and bone and a sheaf of twisting blue veins — he digs his fingernails into the back of my hand.

WHEN THE DOCTOR RETURNS to the hotel, he will show his wife the physical marks the fingernails made as proof of what happened, the things he will tell her with such relief, still feeling a trace of revulsion. He wants to leave but can’t, even though he doesn’t know if it’s his duty as a physician that holds him there or some form of malevolence he can’t shake, no more than he can free himself from the perhaps dying man’s fingernails digging into his hand. Time crawls. His wife will be awake by now and wondering why he isn’t back. She’ll fear suddenly that something happened to him, and be irritated about his mania for running and walking at dawn. We two are most alike in our fear that everything will fall apart, that our life will go down the drain. He needs to pull away from the old man’s hand and call the hotel to calm his wife, but he doesn’t know the number, and the task of finding it seems too great an obstacle.