Antonio Molina - Sepharad

The next morning they got in the car, which still smelled brand-new, a delicious odor of plastic and metal and gasoline, and drove into Madrid like two tourists, she clutching in her lap the purse that contained the letter the whole time. Maybe they would tell her that her father was alive, that he lost his memory because of a head injury and that’s why he never came looking for his family, because she’d seen stories like that in the movies, but she also feared they would certify her father’s death, one more among the millions of nameless corpses thrown into the ditches and common graves of Europe during the time his last letter came from the German camp, a few lines and on the back the pencil drawing of a mountain village with bulbous bell towers and steep roofs. I usually walked holding my husband’s arm, but on that occasion he took mine, gave my name at the embassy office, and showed them the letter and my identity card. I was so frightened among those well-mannered people with blond hair and blue eyes who spoke with a strange accent and were so friendly, not like the Spanish officials who barked rather than spoke and were always in a foul humor. Finally we were taken to a gentleman in a room with a large table in the center, a man who spoke as if to calm me, like a doctor, so I worked up the courage to ask if my father was alive or dead, and he answered, “That’s what we’d like to know, because we’ve been looking for him for years to return his belongings to him.” Then he picked up a large cardboard box from the floor and set it in the middle of the table, a box tied with red tape and sealed with wax but battered, as if it had been shuffled around a lot. My husband and I looked at each other, not knowing what to do, and the man said, “It’s yours, you can take it; the things your father left behind the second time he escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany are in this box.” I looked at it without daring to touch it, and at my husband, who shrugged, nervous too, though later he didn’t want to admit it. They had me sign some papers. I picked up the box, at first expecting it to be heavy, then surprised it was so light. We went outside and walked down Castellana, I carrying the box as if it held something fragile, and my husband told me to give it to him. It was one of those cold, sunny days in Madrid. I couldn’t wait till we got home to open it, and besides, I didn’t want my mother to see it before I knew what was in it. It weighed little, and I could hear things loose inside. We sat down on a bench, and my husband opened it. My knees were shaking, and I was crying as he took things out, everything my father had owned in the camp. There were letters my mother sent him, letters she dictated to a neighbor, the ones my brother wrote him on lined paper from a school notebook, and also the letters I wrote when I was little, just learning to write, and the drawings my brother and I made for him, and snapshots of us, some with our names on the back, written in my clumsy writing. How poor we looked, with our starved and frightened little faces, and how had I forgotten all that in just a few years? There was a photograph of my father in uniform, holding a little girl in his arms, so small that I wasn’t sure it was me, and another of him, very thin, with a shaved head and huge ears and a number underneath, and also papers in French and German, all of them yellowed and so worn that they tore when we tried to unfold them, and lots of drawings on a piece of cardboard or the back of something printed in German, drawings of towns with church towers, trains, and mountains in the background, and portraits of people, men in striped uniforms, with shaved heads, and on a sheet of graph paper a large, pretty drawing of Red Square in Moscow, in color, that looked like a photograph. We closed the box, put it in the trunk of the car, and all the way home I cried as I hadn’t cried in years, like a fool, making everything blurry, and my husband took one hand from the wheel to pat my hand, and he said, “Look, woman, calm down, what are you going to tell your mother when she sees you’ve been crying, she’ll think it’s something I did.”

To make sure her mother wouldn’t see the box, she hid it in the back of her armoire. She lay awake nights trying to imagine what became of her father after his second escape from the German camp — in November 1944, they told her. Maybe his face was disfigured in an explosion and his body decomposed so no one could identify it, or maybe he drowned in a river as he attempted to cross it, or was crushed beneath the wheels of a train or the tread of a tank. Night after night she imagined different deaths for her father, with ghostly landscapes of the war, machine-gun fire, barking dogs. One morning she came home after shopping and was surprised not to find her mother. She felt a flash of alarm even before she ran to the bedroom and saw the doors of her armoire flung open. She ran through the apartment, then went out on the balcony. In the open field across from the building, where excavation was in progress for the foundation of a new structure, she saw her mother bent over, dressed in mourning. She remembered the times she watched her go out every dawn to the Del Este Cemetery. Now her mother was standing beside a fire, throwing things into it. When she heard her daughter call, she turned around but only for a moment, and kept on watching the fire. It was a cloudy, humid morning; the daughter cut across the field toward that solitary figure, her heels sinking into the mud. And as she came closer, she saw her mother was old. Her mother had started a fire with the cardboard of the box and was throwing papers, photographs, and drawings into it with an absorbed deliberation.

“Don’t look at me like that, as if I were robbing you of what’s left of your father.” Her voice was clear and dry, toneless, maybe the same voice of a quarter of a century before when she quietly stood her ground as the mustached, uniformed man and the tall, black-clad woman tried to persuade her, predicting disaster. “Your father is alive, and he doesn’t want to know anything about you or any of us. At the end of the war, the French government gave him a decoration and a large payment, but he never bothered to send us one centime. The last time he wrote me was to tell me that he had begun a new life and was therefore ending all contact with us. I didn’t want you to see that letter. You were still a little girl and always fantasizing about him. He lives in France and has another family, he even changed his name. He’s a French businessman now, that’s why the Germans couldn’t find him. If you want to see the man who was your father, take a train and get off at a French border town called Cerbère.”

THE NEW HOUSE, recently occupied, sparely furnished, still echoing empty, the paint fresh on the walls, wood floors smelling of varnish, all trace erased of those who lived there until a few months before, presences of long years’ standing abolished overnight, like the rectangles on the wall where pictures once hung. Only one thing defines the austere utility of each room, now that it is stripped of decoration: in the bedroom a large iron bed, in the office a table and chair.

The new house, the new life, recently begun in a different city, far from the dreary provinces, in a Madrid neighborhood unknown until now, a small enclave in the heart of Madrid, where the streets are poorer, hidden, working-class, with a blur of strange people of uncertain sex, of skin tones and facial features denoting faraway places, languages heard in passing that carry the sound of Asia, of Muslim settlements and African markets and Andean villages.

Going outside every morning was a journey of discovery, and the customary errands often ended in aimless ambling, in the simple inertia of walking and looking, of hearing indecipherable tongues spoken in telephone booths on Augusto Figueroa, words of the circular and sinister vocabulary of heroin, the ringing, timeless voices of neighborhood women yelling back and forth, of elderly ladies who come to their doors in their bathrobes and look with resigned amazement at what they see or choose not to see, the way their barrio has changed, the affected voices of men transformed into women, although not completely, as sometimes a manly beard shows on cheeks puffed with silicone, or a male bald spot through a blond, tempestuously back-combed mane, or feet much too wide and sinewy in high-heeled patent-leather shoes.