In the Night of Time (61 page)

 

“He told me to come and see you, that you'd help us, just as you've always helped us. I don't know anyone else.” Señorita Rossman fixed her colorless eyes on Ignacio Abel from behind her glasses, which she wiped with a handkerchief that she returned each time to her sleeve with a kind of obstinate, automatic correctness. There was in her something resistant to attractiveness, a kind of helplessness doomed to awaken discomfort, not sympathy. He asked her to come in. She sat on one of the chairs, covered for the summer, in the dining room he rarely entered and where the disorder wasn't so apparent. She had to catch her breath after having climbed five flights of stairs. Ignacio Abel brought her a glass of water, and she placed it carefully on the edge of the table, avoiding his inquisitive glance when their eyes met. Overwhelmed not only by her father's arrest but by remorse at having dragged him to the Soviet Union when they had to leave Germany, she was ultimately responsible for Professor Rossman's being denied what he most desired, a visa for the United States, where he might have continued his career like so many other colleagues from the Bauhaus, expatriates like him who were welcomed into universities and architects' studios while he wandered Madrid, where his reputation was nonexistent and his credentials were worth nothing, selling fountain pens on commission in cafés, sitting in the waiting rooms of offices that never opened for him, devising new plans that would lead nowhere: a trip to Lisbon, where he'd been told that visas for America were less difficult to obtain, or where he and his daughter could board a ship that would carry them to an intermediate South American port, to Rio de Janeiro, Santo Domingo, or Havana, where someone would be careless or corrupt enough not to see the stamps with the hammer and sickle in his stateless person's passport, almost as useless as the expired German passport that had red letters across the page with the photograph:
Juden–Juif.

 

He'd seen Professor Rossman from a distance on Calle Bravo Murillo, and as on many other occasions he'd been tempted to cross to the other side of the street or pass by without attracting his attention. Professor Rossman probably wouldn't see him anyway, so myopic, so distracted in the crowd on the sidewalk in front of the Cine Europa, beneath large red-and-black flags and posters with bright colors and enormous figures in heroic poses, though they no longer displayed only advertisements for films but also battalions of muscular militiamen, workers carrying hammers and rifles, peasants shaking sickles against a red sky where squadrons of airplanes were flying.
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. Militiamen with rifles on their shoulders, tanned by the Sierra sun, drank steins of beer in the shade of a café's striped awning. They talked in noisy groups, some in blue coveralls open to the waist, in odd tunics and trousers of uniforms, in military caps pushed to the back of their heads, almost all of them young, dark-skinned, with long sideburns and kerchiefs around their necks, emboldened when a girl passed near them, intoxicated by the feeling of omnipotence granted them by the collapse of the old order, their possession of weapons, the war, carnival and slaughterhouse all in one. For more than four hours the Popular Front Youth marched through Madrid in an impressive demonstration, cheered enthusiastically by an immense crowd. The war seemed to be simply this rough, nervous joviality, the general untidiness and indolent air of people on a hot August morning, the epic character of those gigantic figures outlined on placards covering the theater's façade, which no one seemed to notice. On the sharp peaks of the Sierra de Córdoba our troops are preparing their assault on the City of the Mosque, waiting impatiently for the order to advance. The war was triumphalist lying newspaper headlines, funerals with fists in the air, somber marches in which death was always something abstract and glorious, parades with large banners and no one keeping time, preceded, as in the now abolished religious processions, by costumed crowds of children marching with wooden shotguns. The unstoppable advance of our troops continues over the rugged terrain of the Sierra de Guadarrama, where day after day enemy forces are being pushed from their positions.

“My friend, my dear Professor Abel, how happy I am to see you.” Professor Rossman, his black briefcase pressed to his chest, wiped his hand on the skirt of his jacket before shaking Abel's; he seemed to be in a great hurry and at the same time not to know where he was going, jumping from one topic to another. “Have you read today's papers? The enemy is retreating on all fronts, but the lines defended by our glorious militias are closer and closer to Madrid. Believe me, I know, I spent four years studying maps of positions on the western front. Have you noticed that the reports deal not with what's already happened but what's about to happen? Granada on the point of surrendering to loyal troops, the fall of the Alcázar de Toledo is expected at any moment, the imminent capture of Oviedo or Córdoba is announced. And what about Zaragoza? How many weeks is it that troops have been advancing and putting the enemy to flight or meeting no resistance, and yet they never reach the city? I spend the day looking at the map and the Spanish-German dictionary. I have to look up Spanish words I thought I already knew. Are you well, still working? Your wife and children? You're not accustomed to living alone, you look thinner. Would you like a drink, a stein of beer? The revolution is now a reality, yet the cafés are still open. It was the same in Berlin when the war was over. This time it's on me. We have to celebrate my daughter's excellent new job . . .”

They looked for a table inside a café. As he sat down, Professor Rossman opened his briefcase and began to take out sections of newspapers and clippings, maps of the kind published every day, with modifications in rebel-occupied territory that according to all the reports kept shrinking, though some rebel positions were close to Madrid. The overwhelming advance of Republican troops along the Aragón front is seen as an imminent threat to the rebels of Zaragoza. Loyal forces are six kilometers from Teruel and continue to hold advantageous positions. Regiments under the command of the heroic Captain Bayo continue their advance toward the reconquest of Mallorca. The rebels of Huesca are in a desperate situation.

Ignacio Abel looked around uncomfortably, afraid someone would overhear what Professor Rossman was saying, be suspicious of his foreign air and war maps.

“Be more careful, Professor,” he said in a quiet voice. “People are denounced on the slightest suspicion.”

“And you ought to take better care of yourself, my dear friend. You don't look well, if you don't mind my saying so. Do you have something to occupy your time? Is it true construction at University City is temporarily suspended? I hear the insurgents plan to attack Madrid on that flank, which makes sense, militarily speaking. Don't look at me that way, don't be afraid. Personally I'm not afraid. I'm an old man and a refugee from Hitler's Germany. Those who expelled me from my country are the ones helping the rebels with armaments and airplanes. What interest can I have in being on their side? Where can I go if they enter Madrid? But as I was saying, there's good news for us, for my daughter above all, excellent news.”

“Did they finally give you visas for America?”

“Who can think now about visas? We'll have to wait for all this to be over in Spain. Not before the end of the summer, if you'll permit my pessimism, no matter what the newspapers say. Will the British and French pressure Hitler and Mussolini not to aid Franco? I don't think so. Your government wants to tell the world it's facing a barbarian invasion on its own, but newspapers throughout Europe are filled with photographs of burned churches and murdered priests and monks. You say the other barbarians kill more? Probably, but that's not held against them by Mussolini or Hitler. And how are you going to explain yourselves if no one in the government speaks foreign languages? I'm not complaining—thanks to that, my daughter's finally found an excellent job now that the children to whom she gave German lessons are all away for the summer. And better paid. She's been hired as a translator in the censorship service for foreign correspondents. She speaks English and Russian almost as well as German, as you know, and her Spanish is excellent, much better than mine will ever be. She works near the pensión, in an office in the Telephone Building, and has a safe-conduct and food coupons. I help her in whatever way I can, as you see. I look for newspaper articles for her, take her to the Telephone Building and pick her up. My poor child's never known how to look after herself, not even when she became a fanatical Communist. She'd go to endless meetings, and her mother would fall asleep—she was already ill at the time and taking strong pain medicines—but I'd stay awake until she returned. My poor child, in love with Lenin and Stalin, just as she'd once been in love with Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go home to review today's press with her before she goes to the office. My daughter thinks she's a Communist, but basically she's a romantic señorita from my grandparents' generation. Instead of reading Heine, she took to reading Karl Marx. Do you know what I'm afraid of? That she'll fall in love with one of those American correspondents who arrive each day in Madrid to see the war at first hand. My daughter's destiny is to suffer for love. For love of a man who ignores her or uses her and deceives her with another woman, or for love of a cause that promises her a total explanation of the world and heaven on earth. The worst has been when the two loves were combined. Do you know why she wanted to go to Russia when we could no longer live in Germany? I followed her, alarmed at her living alone in that frightening country. She wanted to go to Russia to see for herself the homeland of the proletariat and to follow like a dog the leader of the German Communist Party, with whom she fell in love and who took her to bed on a whim even though he was married and had children. Revolutionary morality. They gave my daughter a job as a typist in an office of the Comintern, and from time to time the heroic comrade visited our room in the Hotel Lux and I had to go out for several hours. There are no cafés like this one in Moscow, my friend, no waiters in short white jackets who go on serving you as they did before the revolution. Suddenly the comrade stopped coming, and my daughter spent her nights crying. The new Soviet woman weeping like a señorita of the last century because her beloved no longer visits her as he once did. But the hero also stopped going to the office, where my daughter helped him body and soul in the propaganda struggle that would soon overthrow Hitler, casting an international spotlight on his crimes. He hadn't gone off with another typist or secretary. He hadn't gone back to his wife, about whom nothing was known. One day we learned he'd been arrested. They accused him of complicity with the assassins of Kirov in Leningrad. But he'd never gone to Leningrad and wasn't even in the USSR when Kirov was killed! The other girls in the office stopped speaking to her, and after a few weeks they didn't even look at her. Not at her and not at me. We were like two phantoms in the halls of the Hotel Lux. But we didn't talk to each other when we were alone in our room either. She didn't tell me, but I knew what she was thinking as she sat by the telephone. Her lover had done something worse than betray her—he'd betrayed the revolution or the party or the proletariat. Why would they accuse him if he wasn't guilty? And what if he'd been arrested because of her, because of some indiscretion she'd committed without realizing it? My daughter always burdens herself with the guilt of the world. She still hopes he'll appear, the misunderstanding will vanish, and his good name will be rehabilitated. Day after day no one spoke to us, but she wasn't fired, and we weren't thrown out of the hotel or arrested. But like most people in our situation, we kept a packed suitcase under the bed in the event the police came to take us in the middle of the night. Then one day they came for us. Not in the middle of the night but at eight o'clock in the evening, a short time after my daughter had come home from the office. We heard their footsteps on the stairs, then in the corridor, they knocked on the door, my daughter remained seated, trembling. I felt a certain relief, to tell you the truth. If it was going to happen, better for it to happen sooner rather than later. Young men, polite, in clean uniforms and shining boots, told us to accompany them, and as we walked along the hall I thought, how strange that they've come so early, that they are taking us through the hotel in sight of everyone, not after midnight. They had us climb into a black van—clearly we weren't going to Lubyanka Prison, which wasn't far from the hotel. The van stopped at the railroad station. They almost dragged us along the platform, pushed us into a car, and handed us an envelope with our passports. They could've killed us or sent us to Siberia, but they expelled us, I still don't understand why, why they let us live . . .”

 

Professor Rossman must have seen it all happening again, this time with the certainty that there was no way out: the footsteps on the stairs, the pounding on the door, his daughter shaking, the same suitcase that had been packed in Moscow ready under the bed. But it wasn't his daughter who'd been chosen by misfortune, as he'd always feared. It was him. Sitting in a rocking chair in the heat of an August afternoon, Professor Rossman slowly realized that these methodical men who didn't raise their voices and weren't wearing the coveralls of militiamen or carrying rifles were probably going to kill him.

 

“Of course you did everything you could to save him,” said Van Doren. “Perhaps you even put your own life in danger.”

“Is Rossman dead?” Stevens looked at them in the rearview mirror, not quite following the conversation in Spanish. “In Madrid? I didn't see anything in the paper.”