Antonio Molina - Sepharad

“You aren’t like them, even though you wear the uniform. You must leave here and tell what they’re doing to us. They are killing us all, one by one. When they came to Narva there were ten thousand of us Jews, and now there are fewer than two thousand, and the way they’re going, we won’t last through the winter. No one is spared, not the children, not the old, not the newborn. They take them away in trains, and no one ever comes back.”

“But you’re alive and well, and they invite you to their dances.”

“Because I go to bed with that pig who was with me when you came in. But as soon as he tires of me or thinks it’s dangerous to have a Jewish mistress, I’ll end up like the others.”

“Then get out.”

“And go where? All of Europe is theirs.”

“Why was he invited, if he isn’t military?”

“He supplies clothing and food for the army. He buys up the Jews’ properties for nothing.”

“Must you sleep with him tonight?”

“Not tonight. His wife is waiting for him. They’re giving a dinner for some generals.”

“I’ll take you home.”

“You’re reckless.”

“Tomorrow afternoon I go back to the front.”

He wanted to keep holding her and listening to her, he couldn’t bear to have her leave without him at the end of the dance, but when the piece they were dancing ended and a German officer moved him aside politely but firmly to dance the next dance with her, he couldn’t refuse, because the man in the pinstripe suit was watching her from a distance and maybe had already observed with displeasure that it was a long time since she changed partners, maybe had even guessed what she was saying to the young lieutenant who looked so little like a German despite the uniform. Strong as his desire was, he wanted to protect her and needed to know more, and he began to fear the looming darkness he had ignored until then, the dreadful suspicion of what was unimaginable yet couldn’t be denied. He looked around at the red German faces, the elegance of the uniforms identical to his, which had given him such a thrill the first time he put it on, and felt an instinctive revulsion, though the monstrous thing was invisible, like the desperation of the woman dancing with him, moving her head to the rhythm of the music and smiling, closing her eyes and digging her fingernails into the back of his hand, repeating in a low voice the words that my friend kept hearing long afterward and that still return to him on sleepless nights when the darkness is peopled with the voices and faces of the dead. But the two faces he remembers most clearly are that of the young man in the pince-nez who turned toward him on the road as if wanting to tell him something, and that of the woman he danced with over and over, he doesn’t know how many times, falling in love with her and being infected by her fear, her clear vision, her fatalism. What would her voice sound like now? With what accent would she speak German? Now, as I write, reliving what my friend told me, I would invent her, say that she was Sephardic by birth and spoke a few words to him in Ladino, establishing with him, in that remote city in Estonia and in the midst of all those German officers, the melancholy complicity of a secretly shared fatherland.

But it isn’t necessary to invent or add a thing for that woman to materialize, to appear to me in the restaurant where my friend and I were talking amid all the noise and people, in the mix of conversations, steam from hot dishes, cigarettes, cell phones. He who has not been able to forget her for more than half a century has bequeathed her to me now, transferring the memory of her to my imagination, but I won’t give her an origin or a name, I haven’t the authority, she isn’t a ghost or fictional character but someone who was as real as I am, who had a destiny as unique as mine although far more cruel, a biography that can neither be supplanted by the beautiful lie of literature nor reduced to arithmetical data, another cipher among the immense number of the dead. “Fifty-six years I’ve been remembering her, and I always wonder whether she survived or died in one of those camps that we knew nothing about then, not because they were run in absolute secrecy, since that is impossible, it would have been like keeping the operations of the railway system of an entire nation secret, but because we didn’t want to believe the unbelievable. I went back to Narva thirty years later, when I traveled for the first time to Leningrad, to a psychology conference organized by UNESCO. It wasn’t easy to do, but I obtained permission to visit the city, although they assigned me a Soviet guide who didn’t leave me alone for a minute. Now the name was written on the station platform in Cyrillic characters, and the road along the river was gone, and in its place was an entire neighborhood of those horrid cement-colored buildings. It must seem absurd to you, and it was so then to me, but the minute I arrived in Narva I started looking at every woman, with my heart in my mouth, as if I might run into her and recognize her after thirty years. Looking not for a woman a little older than I was, which would have made her over sixty, but the same young redhead I danced with that night, falling more in love with her by the minute, weak with desire, so excited that I was dizzy, and afraid she could see, or someone else could, despite the heavy cloth of my trousers, how aroused I was.

The Soviet guide or watchdog made a show of glancing at his watch and gave my friend a disgusted look, and reminded him that they would have to go back to the station soon, they couldn’t miss the return train to Leningrad, but my friend kept walking, ignoring his guide and leaving him a few paces behind, slightly bent over and moving quickly, as he did when we left the restaurant, his wise little eyes darting everywhere. Turning a corner, he recognized the cobbled square and the mansion where the dance had been held and the streetcar tracks, which had the same film of dirt and neglect as the facade of the mansion, which now, according to the guide, was the headquarters of Estonia’s unions. He didn’t recall all the cables strung from one side of the square to the other, and of course the gigantic statue of Lenin in the center, circled by streetcars clanging and jerking along, came afterward. But he perceived the same icy damp edge to the air and the smell of the river that couldn’t be far away, now mixed with the general odor of boiled cabbage and bad gasoline that seemed to be the indelible essence of the Soviet Union. Time did not exist; he heard the footsteps of hundreds of men on the hard-packed dirt of a road and the wire barbs scraping the ground, and saw a thin, pale face turned toward him, eyes again appealing to him through pince-nez glasses, then slowly disappearing down the road and the years to fade into the unbridgeable gulf between those who died and those who were saved, those who were now in the ground and those who walked across it with the lightheartedness of people who don’t realize that wherever they step, they are stepping on graves.

“HOW STRANGE TO BE standing at a streetcar stop across from the mansion and see yourself as you were thirty years before, because it isn’t that I was remembering,” my friend says. “I was literally seeing myself, the way you might see someone in the street and have trouble recognizing him because it’s been so long since the last time. I was so young, so different, a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in a German uniform.” I could feel what he was feeling at that moment, the excitement and suspense of the waiting, the fear that his friend the captain might appear and suspect something or simply tell him he had to go back to headquarters. Because before leaving him to dance with a commander of the SS, the redheaded woman had told him to let a half hour go by and then meet her on the other side of the square beneath the shelter for the streetcar stop. He watched her move away through the dancing couples, now in the arms of the man in the black uniform, who was a little taller than she, casually turning to look for him while talking to her partner. He had to give her time to make small talk with some friends of her lover, who had never taken his eyes off her and who now and then sent short, precise signals to her, time to say good-bye. He didn’t need to have someone take her home since she lived only two stops away on the streetcar. “I won’t leave you alone for a moment,” my friend told her, not being foolhardy but with the same assurance and absence of fear he felt sometimes as he leaped over a trench, immune to bullets, exalted and agile, pistol in hand, hoarse from shouting orders to the soldiers advancing behind him, fighting through the clay and tangles of wire and cadavers strewn across the no-man’s-land. “I won’t leave you by yourself,” he told her again, when their dance ended and she tried to step away from him because the SS commander was waiting his turn. “If you want to help me, do as I told you,” she pleaded, with an urgency that widened her eyes, and immediately smiled at the German officer who took her in his arms with a polite nod to my friend.