Antonio Molina: Sepharad

A statue ensconced on that facade undoubtedly represented Søren Kierkegaard. Stooped over, as if watching something below, hands behind his back, he did not have that attitude of elevation or of definitive immobility typical of statues. After death, after a century and a half of official immortality, of rubbing elbows with all those solemn heroes, saints, generals, and tribunes of the historic pantheon of Denmark, Kierkegaard — that is, his statue — still had a transient, temporary, restless demeanor, a look of uneasiness about walking alone through a closed and hostile city, casting sidelong glances at people he scorned and who scorned him still more, not only for his hump and large head but for the incomprehensible extravagance of his writings, his fervent biblical faith. He was as exiled and stateless in his native city as if he had been forced to live on the other side of the world.

I looked for the way back to the hotel. In less than an hour my editor — whom in truth I scarcely knew — would be coming to pick me up. On one long, bourgeois street of clothing and antique shops I saw a tiled roof projecting rather absurdly from a whitewashed or painted wall in which there was a wooden door with metal hinges and doorknocker and a window grill filled with geraniums. I, who on that Saturday afternoon had felt so far from everything on my walk through the empty streets of Copenhagen, had found a Spanish oasis called Pepe’s Bar.

A WOMAN WAS SEATED beside me at a large oval table in the Writer’s Club. As has happened other times, the luncheon was in my honor, but no one was paying much attention to me. Before each of us was a card with a name. The woman’s name was an enigma and a promise: Camille Pedersen-Safra. I can’t resist the attraction of names. She told me she’d been born in France, into a Jewish family of Spanish descent. Pedersen was her married name. While the other guests were laughing and heatedly talking, relieved at not having to make conversation with a stranger they knew nothing about, she told me that she and her mother escaped from France on the eve of the fall of Paris, in the great exodus of June 1940. They had returned to that country only once, in the autumn of 1944, and both realized that after only those few years they no longer belonged to the country of their birth, from which they would have been deported to the death camps had they not escaped in time, and to show their gratitude they had become Danish citizens. Denmark, too, was occupied by the Germans and subjected to the same anti-Jewish laws as those of France, but unlike the French Vichy government the Danish authorities did not collaborate in isolating and deporting Jews, did not even apply the law making them wear a yellow star.

Camille Safra had been six at the time of their flight from France. She remembered her displeasure when her mother shook her awake in the middle of the night, and the strange, warm, and vaguely pleasant sensation of traveling wrapped in blankets in a trailer behind a truck, beneath a canvas being beaten by the rain. She also remembered sleeping in kitchens or entryways of houses that weren’t hers, places where there was a strong odor of apples and hay, and she sometimes had flashes of mysterious routes along moonlit country roads, held in her mother’s arms beneath the shelter of a wet woolen shawl, listening to the creaking of a cart and the slow hoofbeats of a horse. She remembered, or dreamed of, lonely lights on street corners and in barn windows, the red lights of locomotives, and series of lights in the windows of trains she and her mother did not succeed in boarding.

In her memory, the journey into exile had all the sweetness of childhood well-being, the way children settle comfortably into the exceptional and give dimensions to things that adults cannot know and that have nothing to do with what is being experienced. When she left France, Camille was still submerged in that mythology; but by ten or eleven, when she and her mother returned, her adult sense of the real was nearly established. She had precise images now, colored with a sadness that was the reverse of the mysterious dream of the first journey.

She was a redheaded woman, stocky, energetic, careless in her dress, with features more central European than Latin and pronounced by age. I’ve seen Jewish women very much like her in the United States and in Buenos Aires: women of a certain age, fleshy, negligently dressed, lips brightly painted. She smoked a lot, unfiltered cigarettes, and conversed brilliantly, leaping between English and French according to her needs or limitations in expression, and she drank beer with a superb Scandinavian panache. She wrote book reviews for a newspaper and a radio program. The editor who had brought me to the luncheon, and who in the heat of conversation and the beer seemed not to remember I was there, had mentioned her influence when he introduced me, indicating that a favorable review from her was important to a book, especially one written by an unknown foreign author. I had the firm and melancholy conviction that the book, my reason for being in Copenhagen, would not attract Danish readers, so I was feeling remorse in advance for the bad deal the editor was getting from me, and I forgave him and was even grateful that at this luncheon at the Writer’s Club he had abandoned me to my fate. In any case, the event was not that successful; there were unoccupied tables in the large dining room with its mythological paintings. Before serving, the waiters had removed those settings.

I also noted with annoyance as Camille Safra was talking that she hadn’t said a word about the Danish edition of my book. She told me that her mother had died several months ago, in Copenhagen, and that in the last conversation she’d had with her the two of them agreed about details of that journey to France, especially something that had happened one night at a hotel in a small town near Lyon.

They were looking for relatives. Few had survived. Old neighbors and acquaintances looked on them with suspicion, perhaps fearing that they’d come back to make some claim, to accuse them or ask for an accounting. Camille’s mother had taken her to that small town — she didn’t give me the name — because someone had told her mother that one of her sisters took refuge there in early 1943. They found no record of the sister’s having been arrested, though neither was there any information about where she might be — and they never found out. People disappeared in those days, said Camille Safra, trails were lost; her aunt’s name was not on any list of deportees, repatriated, or dead. They came by train very early in the morning and ate a breakfast of cold coffee, black bread, and rancid butter in the station canteen. They asked questions of several unsociable early risers, who looked at them sullenly and refused to give the simplest information for fear of compromising themselves, since at that time collaborators were being flushed out.

Hungry, disoriented, strangers in the country that four years before had been theirs, their feet aching after walking all day, they found themselves, when night overtook them, in an open area near the shelter of a streetcar stop. They couldn’t return to Paris until the following morning. The streetcar had left them at a plaza with closed-up shops and with a monument to the fallen of the First World War; nearby was a street lamp lighting the sign of a hotel that called itself the Commerce.

They rented a room. They went upstairs to go straight to bed because the electricity would be turned off at nine. Sitting on the bed beneath a bulb that faded to pale red then revived to shed an oily yellow light, they shared a package of food they’d been given by the Red Cross. Then, dressed, and with their arms around each other, they lay down, icy feet touching beneath the thin blanket and threadbare bedspread. Her mother, Camille Safra told me, never locked doors; she was terrified of being trapped, of losing the key and not being able to get out. In the shelters, when the air-raid sirens sounded, she had attacks of sweating and panic. If they went to the movies, as soon as the film was over she rushed to the exit, for fear that everyone would leave before her and they would lock the doors, thinking the theater was empty.