Antonio Molina: Sepharad

Now I understand that in our dry inland country night trains are the great river that carries us to the world outside and then brings us back, the great waterway slipping through shadows toward the sea or the beautiful cities where a new life awaits us, luminous and true to what we were promised in books. As clearly as I remember that first train trip, I remember the first time I stopped at a border station; in both memories are the brilliant night, anticipation, and fear of the unknown that made my pulse race and my knees buckle. Scowling, rough-mannered policemen examined our passports on the platform at Cerbère Station. Cerbère. Cerberus. Sometimes stations at night do resemble the entrance to Hades, and their names contain curses: Cerbère, where in the winter of 1939 French gendarmes humiliated the soldiers of the Spanish Republic, insulted them, pushed and kicked them; Port Bou, where Walter Benjamin took his life in 1940; Gmünd, the station on the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria where Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenska sometimes met secretly, within the parentheses of train schedules, within the exasperating brevity of time running out the minute they saw each other, the minute they climbed the stairs toward the inhospitable room in the station hotel where the rumble of passing trains rattled the windowpanes.

What would it be like to arrive at a German or Polish station in a cattle car, to hear orders shouted in German over the loudspeakers and not understand a word, to see the distant lights, wire fences, and tall, tall chimneys expelling black smoke? For five days, in February 1944, Primo Levi traveled in a cattle car toward Auschwitz. Through cracks in the wood planks where he pressed his lips to breathe he glimpsed the names of the last stations in Italy, and each name was a farewell, a step in the voyage north toward winter cold, toward names of stations in German and then Polish, isolated towns no one had yet heard of: Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz. It took Margarete Buber-Neumann three weeks to travel from Moscow to the Siberian camp where she had been sentenced to serve ten years. When only three had passed, they ordered her onto a train back to Moscow, and she thought she would be set free; the train, however, did not stop in Moscow, it continued west. When finally it stopped at the border station of Brest-Litovsk, the Russian guards told Buber-Neumann to hurry and get her belongings together, because they were in German territory. Between the boards nailed over the window, she saw the black-uniformed SS on the platform and understood with horror and infinite fatigue that because she was German, Stalin’s guard were handing her over to Hitler’s guard, fulfilling an infamous clause in the German-Soviet pact.

The great night of Europe is shot through with long, sinister trains, with convoys of cattle and freight cars with boarded-up windows moving very slowly toward barren, wintry, snow- or mud-covered expanses encircled by barbed wire and guard towers. Arrested in 1937, tortured, subjected to interrogations that lasted four or five days without interruption, days and nights during which she had to remain standing, then locked for two years in solitary confinement, Eugenia Ginzburg, a militant Communist, was sentenced to twenty years of forced labor in camps near the Arctic Circle, and the train that carried her to her imprisonment took an entire month to cover the distance between Moscow and Vladivostok. During the journey, the women prisoners told one another their life stories, and sometimes when the train was stopped at a station, they put their heads out a window or to a breathing place between two boards and shouted their names to anyone passing by, or tossed out a letter or a piece of paper on which they’d scrawled their names, with the hope that the news that they were still alive would eventually reach their families. If one of two survives, if she gets back, before doing anything else she will look for the other’s parents or husband or children and tell them how her friend lived and died, give evidence that through hell and in the farthest reaches her friend never stopped thinking of them. In the Ravensbrück camp, Margarete Buber-Neumann and her soul mate Milena Jesenska made that vow. Milena told Margarete about her love affair with a man dead for twenty years, Franz Kafka, and she also told her the stories he had written, stories Margarete hadn’t read or heard till then and for that reason enjoyed even more, like the age-old stories no one has written down and yet are revived whole and powerful as soon as someone tells them aloud: the story, say, of the surveyor who comes to a village where there’s a castle he is never able to enter, or the one about the man who wakes one morning turned into an insect, or the one where police come to the director of a bank one day and tell him that he is going to be tried, although he never learns what accusation was brought against him.

The love affair between Milena Jesenka and Franz Kafka is crisscrossed with letters and trains, and in it distance and written words count more than real meetings and caresses. In the spring of 1939, a few days before the German army entered Prague, Milena sent to Willy Haas the letters from Kafka that she had kept, the last of them coming to her sixteen years before, in 1923. On the journey toward the death camp, in the dark stations where the train would stop all night, she must have remembered the emotion and the anguish of those secret journeys of other days, when she was married and lived in Vienna and her lover lived in Prague, and they would meet halfway in the border town of Gmünd, or the first time they met, after several months of exchanging letters, at the station in Vienna. Before they started writing, they saw each other only once, in a café, scarcely noticing each other, and now suddenly he wanted to reclaim from the fuzzy fringes of memory the face of this woman. I warn you that I cannot remember your face in detail. I remember only your moving away between the small tables in the café: your figure, your dress… I still see them. He has taken the train in Prague, knowing that at the same time she has taken another in Vienna, and his impatience and desire are no stronger than his fear, because he knows that within a few hours he will hold in his arms a physical woman who is scarcely more than a ghost of his imagination and their letters. Fear is unhappiness, he wrote to her. He fears that the train will arrive and he will find Milena standing there, her light-colored eyes searching for him, and also fears that she had second thoughts at the last moment and stayed in Vienna with her husband, who does not make her happy, who deceives her with other women, but whom she doesn’t want or is unable to leave. He consults his watch, looks at the names of the stations at which the train is stopping, and is tormented by an urgent wish for the hours to race by, to already be there, but also by the fear of arriving and finding himself alone on the platform of the station in Gmünd. And he fears the impetuous physical presence of Milena, who is much younger and healthier than he, more skillful and more daring in sex.

Unconscious memory is the yeast of imagination. I did not know until this very moment, while I was trying to imagine Franz Kafka’s journey on a night express, that I was in fact remembering a journey I myself made when I was twenty-two, one sleepless night on a train to Madrid, on my way to a rendezvous with a woman with light eyes and chestnut hair. I had sent her a telegram minutes before buying my second-class ticket with borrowed money and foolishly leaving everything behind. When I reached the station at dawn, there was no one there to meet me.

What would it be like to approach a border checkpoint and not know if you would be turned back, if the uniformed guards who examined your papers with cruel deliberation, looking up arrogantly to compare the face in the passport photograph with the fear-filled face struggling to seem normal and innocent, would prevent you from crossing to the other side, to the salvation only a few feet away? After meeting Milena for the first time and spending four days with her, Kafka took the express from Vienna to Prague, nervous about getting to his job the next morning, feeling a mixture of happiness and guilt, of sweet intoxication and intolerable amputation, for now he couldn’t bear to be alone and who knows how long it would be before he could meet his lover again? When the train stopped at the station in Gmünd, the border police told him that he could not continue on to Prague; one paper was lacking among his numerous documents, an exit visa that could be issued only in Vienna. On the night of March 15, 1938, when Kafka had been dead for almost fourteen years, safe from all worry and guilt, that same express, which left Vienna for Prague at 11:15, was filled with refugees — Jews and leftists, especially — because Hitler had just entered the city, welcomed by crowds howling like packs of wild beasts, their arms uplifted, shouting his name with the hoarse, collective roar of a raging ocean, yelling Heil to the Führer and to the Reich, clamoring for the annihilation of the Jews. Uniformed Austrian Nazis boarded the Prague express at intermediate stations and looted the baggage of the refugees, whom they beat and subjected to insults and curses. Many passengers had no papers, and at the border station the Czech guards prevented them from continuing. Some leaped from the train and fled across the fields, hoping to cross the border in the shelter of night.